Sooooo, you may or may not have seen on Twitter that there is currently a case in an Oklahoma court about A/B/O fanfiction. Courtney Milan provides a good summary in the thread above, but the tl;dr is that a romance novel author has been claiming that they invented A/B/O (specifically, f/m A/B/O) and sending DMCA takedown notices to authors of other A/B/O works. One of the targets of these takedown notices is now taking them to court.

So this seems like a good time to remind everyone of Netweight’s very well researched piece on the origins of A/B/O.

And if you’re interested in what fan studies scholars have to say about the Omegaverse, Fanhackers’ very own elmyra has published a paper on consent in A/B/O. (If you’d like a copy, hit @elmyra up on Twitter, where they’re much more likely to see your message.)

There are other fan studies scholars who work on A/B/O, though most of that work has so far made the conference circuit but not print. But here’s a guest post by Elise Vist about her work on monstrous, hockey-robot Omegas.

We’ll be keeping an eye on that court case and update you if anything exciting happens.

Here we go again. A dude is making a thing that mostly non-dude fans have been doing for decades so suddenly it has value and is worthy of attention.

And to make up for making you look at this with your own eyes, here’s some great research on some great fan art.

Fan art as activism on race issues

Gilliland, Elizabeth. 2016. “Racebending Fandoms and Digital Futurism.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 22.

Gilliland looks at fan art on Tumblr which recasts white characters from popular culture as people of colour. She argues that this practice is a form of activism that rejects mainstream media whitewashing and creates an ethno-futuristic space.

Pornographic fan art, time and desire

Brown, Lyndsay. 2013. “Pornographic Space-time and the Potential of Fantasy in Comics and Fan Art.” In “Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books,” edited by Matthew J. Costello, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 13.

Brown looks at pornographic comics and fan art and how they relate to time, pleasure, and desire. She argues that in some ways sequential pornographic comics and single-image pornographic fan art are similar to each other and fundamentally different to written or filmed pornography. The still image stands in a different relationship to time to the filmed or written narrative. “[T]he pleasure of these works lingers across bodies in various states of being, frozen in time, taking a hedonistic joy not just in depicting the intimate, but also in expanding that category past any limits imposed by the panel.”

Fan art as fannish and industry history

Švelch, Jan, and Tereza Krobová. 2016. “Historicizing Video Game Series through Fan Art Discourses.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 22.

Švelch and Krobová look at fan art for video game series, and how it and the material surrounding it (artists’ notes, comments, etc.) interweave fans’ personal histories with those of the video game franchise and the in-game fictional setting.

destinationtoast:

meeedeee:

“What you’ll notice from the chart is that between 2007 and 2009, things were happening with LiveJournal that made people not like it anymore. From the chart, you’ll see that it didn’t start to precipitously dip until a couple of years after that. You can see that Tumblr and Archive of Our Own, or AO3, are both climbing around the same time. I think that those had to get popular enough, enough people moving there so that those were a place for people to move to, because when there’s nowhere for you to go, they don’t go. You can think of AO3 and Tumblr as sort of the archive side and the social side of LiveJournal, so there wasn’t a single place that people could move to, so instead you see people going to both of those places.” 

Good article! (though, minor quibble, I wish Slate hadn’t made a graphic of which fandoms were most popular on each platform. I suspect those answers were the ones most influenced by survey methodology and the specific sample that happened to participate while the survey was open – which the original write-up was good about mentioning, but the graphic makes it look more authoritative.)

Some of you might have spotted this week’s kerfuffle about how it if was written by a dude it can’t be fanfic, in the guise of an interview with author Lonely Christopher, who claims not to have written fan fiction of Stephen King’s The Shining. The Mary Sue article covers it pretty well (and has a link to the original interview, should you be that way inclined), but we thought we’d highlight some Fan Studies research that could help Christopher put his work in the wider fan fiction context.

Here are a couple of extracts from the interview to get us started:

“LC: The book can be read as a self-contained “novel,” but it’s more than that. I used another text conceptually, structurally, and materially to generate a resultant yet original work. That’s what I mean by “source.”

The text that I was utilizing was the novel The Shining by Stephen King and the subsequent media iterations and interpretations and its cultural ubiquity. So I wrote my story in relation to another, more specifically on top of it. I took the basic tropes of The Shining and replicated and subverted them, and I also took chunks of language and interwove material pieces of Stephen King’s novel.

(…)

Interviewer: You’ve described this book as “intertextual.” Tell us a little bit more about this book’s relationship to other literature.

LC: The book is a concerted rejection of the standards of any type of literature, so in that way it is reacting to the formal elements it eschews, and interacting with readerly expectations as well as the history of the medium.

I guess the reason why this isn’t “fan fiction” is because, first of all, it’s not enjoyable in the same way and then it’s vaguely academic. Aesthetically speaking, it owes much to Stein, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Bernhard. Intellectually, it has a relationship to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Debord, and especially Baudrillard. So it is having conversations with different texts in different ways.”

You may recall a couple of relevant articles, such as this one by Abigail Derecho on fan fiction as “archontic literature”. One of the really interesting points Derecho makes in it is how fan fiction writers will frequently repeat the same motif, explore the same scene, but with a difference. (For those interested in the “vaguely academic”, Derecho bases on Deleuze’s concept of “repetition with a difference”.) So we may look at something from a different character’s point of view, or take a group of characters and put them in a coffee shop AU, or try to work out what would be different if a character had made a slightly different choice. You know what that does? It plays with and challenges the reader’s expectations, and allows readers to make meanings from both the similarities and the differences between the two texts.

You may also remember this paper by Mafalda Stasi which looks at fan fiction as a “palimpsest” – the medieval practice of partially erasing and writing over past manuscripts, creating layers of text and meaning. Does that sound a bit like what Christopher is doung by writing his novel “on top of” The Shining? Maybe a bit.

Fan fiction and transformative work intellectual property law scholars like Rebecca Tushnet may also have something to say about Christopher’s taking “chunks of language” and “inter[weaving] material pieces” of King’s novel, and how ideas about this both among the fan fiction community and among rightholders of the commercial works we base our fan fiction on have evolved over time to a point where Lonely Christopher can do this.

Check out this free Fan Studies lecture on early fan studies by Lori Morimoto! It’s a great overview of some of the works that started fan studies as a discipline. It also puts them in a contemporary context, sketching out how fandom and approaches to studying it have changed since.

If you were following us on Twitter over the weekend of June 24th-25th this year, you may have noticed that we went to the Fan Studies Network Conference and did a spot of live-tweeting. We may also have mentioned that Louisa Stein’s excellent keynote titled “Fandom/Resistance” made us cry – in fact it made an entire room of totally respectable, grown-up academics tear up on several occasions.

The Fan Studies Network has published an audio recording of Louisa’s keynote, along with timestamps and links to the videos Louisa shared. It’s definitely 30 minutes well spent.

Call for papers with deadline (technically) today. Collection editor Rukmini Pande says on Twitter:

#RaceInFandom abstracts have been super exciting but still looking to fill some gaps! Latinx and Asian fans/fandoms are under-repped atm

and

Please do get in touch if you have an idea! I can extend the deadline for a bit!

The list is in French, but the journals listed are all in English, and they’re all free to access for anyone. Excellent resource.

Spotlighting some research in progress today. Cath Duchastel’s ongoing PhD research into disabled fans in online fanfiction communities looks at five key questions:

1. Are disabled fans contributing to the critical examination of disabled characters in fandoms and fanfiction?
2. Are disabled fans contributing to fostering discussion among fans about ablesim, web and other forms of accessibility, and the means by which disability oppression manifest?
3. Why have certain online fanfiction spaces welcomed disabled people whereas so many others have not?
4. What roles are the technological affordances and practices of digital media and technologies playing in the development of fanfiction communities as spaces where disability is present?
5. What insight can fanfiction as a creative practice offer about how and why cultural representation impacts agency and facilitates political participation and lasting social change?

One of Cath’s mini-projects is tracking of disability-related tags on AO3 over six months, and she is planning to put the results of this up on her website.

There are millions of fan fiction works both online and off. Though many content creators support or even encourage fan-made books, comics, plays, or films inspired by their work, others see them as infringing their copyrights or eating into their profits. Some have responded with lawsuits. In this talk, Harvard Copyright Advisor Kyle Courtney explores court cases related to fan fiction and fair use, the doctrine in copyright law that allows users to build on others’ work without permission. 

Cases discussed include the recently settled Star Trek case, Paramount Pictures v. Axanar, and the JK Rowling/Harry Potter lawsuit, Warner Brothers v. RDR Books. 

Presenter: Kyle Courtney, Copyright Advisor, Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication

There are two specific reasons I think the current state of fandom could be seen as a successor — or at least a second cousin twice removed — of classical cinephilia, and the first one is this: just as cinephilia came into (or perhaps more accurately closest to) the mainstream was when the first generation of cinephiles grew up and started working behind the camera, creating entire film movements like the French New Wave, some devoted fans have started getting their hands on the reins of long-running franchises.

Great list of syllabi on a wide range of fandom-related topics. Check them out, and add your own if you’re a teacher.

What gets you excited about academic studies in fandom?

“Here’s what I’m excited about,” said Karen Hellekson in 2008: “an academic journal that welcomes, instead of rejects or overtly mocks, fan studies as a topic … that takes as a given the notion that fans provide something valuable to our culture that ought to be analyzed.”

That journal is Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC): run, peer-reviewed, edited, and supported by OTW members and fans like you.

TWC is a journal with contributions from fan studies scholars all over the world. Edited by Hellekson and Kristina Busse, TWC has produced 15 issues so far, featuring fascinating contributions in topics ranging from fanvids to fan labor to Supernatural.

Here’s another reason to get excited: TWC is completely free to the public, and has been from the beginning. Academic journals are traditionally locked to people with university affiliations. Often you have to pay US$30 to $45 for access to a single article. But ours is an online-only Open Access Gold journal: free for the readers at the point of access. Plus, our Creative Commons copyright lets anyone reprint the essays for free. These are essential principles behind TWC, enabling its goal of connecting academics and fans through community and accessibility. That’s why the journal also has an open space for non-academic fans to chime in, through the Symposium section in every issue.

Read more

Panel presentation at the 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Seattle WA, March 21, 2014 featuring @melstanfill, @derekjohnsonUW, @iheartfatapollo, and @mkackman

A large directory of pro writers’ policies on fan fiction, including mostly authors who write in English. The directory links to direct quotes or other sources that indicate the authors’ opinions on fan fiction about their works. The directory is somewhat outdated but still a very interesting resource, especially since it seems to include some authors who aren’t mentioned on Fanlore’s Professional Author Fanfic Policies page yet.

The owner of the Fanworks Inc. site has indicated in May this year that they may take the whole site down, so best grab the information on here soon if you need it.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is currently in its third edition and encompasses over 4 million words about all things SF. It is published online in collaboration with Gollancz and the SF Gateway.

This new version follows thirty-five years of work (on and off), and is heavily expanded from previous editions. The first being under the General Editorship of Peter Nicholls in 1979; and the 1993 Second Edition, being edited by John Clute (the most prolific contributor to date) and Peter Nicholls. The third edition is based on the 1995 CD-Rom “printing” and it has David Langford as the primary technical editor as well as a contributor.

As a resource for fan studies, the encyclopedia is useful because it includes a whole section titled “Culture” including separate categories/tags for “Publication”, “Fan”, “Award”, and “International”. It is by no means comprehensive but it does offer information not always found elsewhere, especially regarding SF fanzines and Big Name Fans (of literature especially).

The tenth issue of Participations, an online open access journal for audience studies, has a section full of new articles about fan culture. The section was put together by the Fan Studies Network, a network for fan studies researchers.

I haven’t had time to read any of the articles yet, but it sounds like there’s some very interesting stuff in here about many fandoms and fan practices – from Doctor Who, Glee, and Star Wars to Tumblr, kink memes, fandom and politics, and dojinshi. Here’s a list of all the fan-themed articles in the issue (all links go to PDFs):

Bennett, Lucy & Tom Phillips: ‘An introduction: The Fan Studies Network – new connections, new research’

Booth, Paul & Peter Kelly: ‘The changing faces of Doctor Who fandom: New fans, new technologies, old practices?’

Busse, Kristina: ‘Geek hierarchies, boundary policing, and the gendering of the good fan’

Chin, Bertha & Lori Hitchcock Morimoto: ‘Towards a theory of transcultural fandom’

Ellison, Hannah: ‘Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Glee Kink Meme’

Hills, Matt: ‘Fiske’s ‘textual productivity’ and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?’

Lamerichs, Nicolle: ‘The cultural dynamic of doujinshi and cosplay: Local anime fandom in Japan, USA and Europe’

Pett, Emma: ’“Hey! Hey! I’ve seen this one, I’ve seen this one. It’s a classic!”: Nostalgia, repeat viewing and cult performance in Back to the Future’

Proctor, William: ’“Holy crap, more Star Wars! More Star Wars? What if they’re crap?”: Disney, Lucasfilm and Star Wars online fandom in the 21st century’

Sandvoss, Cornel: ‘Toward an understanding of political enthusiasm as media fandom: Blogging, fan productivity and affect in American politics’

Whiteman, Natasha, Joanne Metivier: ‘From post-object to “Zombie” fandoms: The “deaths” of online fan communities and what they say about us’

Bury, Rhiannon, Ruth Deller, Adam Greenwood & Bethan Jones: ‘From Usenet to Tumblr: The changing role of social media’

McCulloch, Richard, Virginia Crisp, Jon Hickman & Stephanie Jones: ‘Of proprietors and poachers: Fandom as negotiated brand ownership’

Freund, Kathrina & Dianna Fielding: ‘Research ethics in fan studies’

Jones, Bethan & Lucy Bennett: ‘Blurring boundaries, crossing divides: An interview with Will Brooker’

Delmar, Javier Lozano & Victor Hernández-Santaolalla & Marina Ramos: ‘Fandom generated content: An approach to the concept of ‘fanadvertising’’

Sturm, Damion & Andrew McKinney: ‘Affective hyper-consumption and immaterial labors of love: Theorizing sport fandom in the age of new media’