Transformative Works and Cultures

Did you know that the OTW’s journal, Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), is more than just academics writing about fandom? TWC actually has all kinds of content that's written by and for fans, such as its just-released ninth issue, which focuses on fan/remix video. The best part about TWC, at least if you ask its editors, is that its articles get discussed, debated, and even argued about within fan culture, while still serving as a resource to acafen, other academics, and the media.

For example, the most recent issue was repeatedly referenced at the yearly conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The upcoming tenth issue, co-edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, concentrates on fan activism and has already been referenced in the New York Times even before publication. Since the journal's founding five years ago, the editors of TWC have received numerous reprint requests for print anthologies.

OTW founded TWC with the intention of providing a space for academic research on fandom and fan works in order to showcase the breadth and importance of such studies to other academics, other fans, and the outside public. As part of its commitment to creative freedom, all of TWC’s articles are licensed through Creative Commons, which means anyone can republish the essays as soon as they are published, so long as the republishing party provides a link to the original source.

Lately, more and more academics are calling for a boycott on long-established publishers who use academic—often publicly funded—labor for the research, writing, peer review, and even editing of their articles, but nevertheless prevent the public from having access to the final products. Such traditional models of publishing keep valuable information behind pay walls at increasingly prohibitive costs. Due to its status as an online-only, Open Source, peer-reviewed academic journal, TWC exists not only on the cutting edge of current academic movements, but also at the forefront of the fight for intellectual freedom and continued informational access.

Be sure to check out essays on mashups, remixes, fan trailers, and more in the latest issue of TWC, and donate to help OTW continue this vital, ground-breaking project!

Thank you to Kristina Busse, editor, for providing the overwhelming amount of information for this post.

Transformative Works and Cultures has released No. 9, Fan/Remix Video, guest edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo. An exciting slate of essays and multimedia explorations discuss issues related to videos of all sorts, including fan videos, AMVs, and political remix. Check out TWC's vids for the issue:

"Nirgaga," trailer for TWC's Fan/Remix Video issue by Kevin Tomasura (2012).

"Timeshifting," trailer for TWC's Fan/Remix Video issue by Kevin Tomasura (2012)

Tracking Error," trailer for TWC's Fan/Remix Video issue by Kevin Tomasura (2012).

This special issue of TWC provides scholarly essays, multimedia, and interviews, most of which utilize the online-only aspect of TWC to embed videos and images. It engages a broad variety of remix video genres--vids, anime music videos, political remix, queer video, fan trailers and reedits, and others--and features cutting-edge theoretical essays about the ways in which multimedia literacy is changing our culture.

The guest editors hope that this issue will be of interest to artists, fans, and academics alike. "One of the things that interested us was the way remix sits within the classic liberal arts," says Francesca Coppa. "Both Julie Levin Russo and I have taught courses about remix, and we hope this issue will be useful to teachers and learners alike."

Paul Booth considers how remixes mash together two time frames. Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson claim that scholars of remix typically paint vidders as articulate consumers rather than as producers in their own right. Virginia Kuhn discuss vids in terms of rhetoric and reading strategies. Kim Middleton links the crisis of the humanities and the rise of the remix. Sarah Fiona Winters provides a close reading of two vids that many fans will recognize: "Closer" and "On the Prowl." Agnese Vellar analyzes vids that riff on Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video. And Kathleen Williams assesses fake and fan movie trailers as architectural desire lines.

Martin Leduc surveys the career of political remixer Jonathan McIntosh; Zephra Doerr looks at anime abridged series; and Forest Phillips explores Star Wars fan edits and recuts. Popular vidder counteragent interviews fellow vidder Bradcpu, and artists Desiree D'Alessandro and Diran Lyons together discuss the ways remix culture has influenced their work. Brett Boessen presents a video interview with fair use advocates Eric Faden and Nina Paley. And Lindsay Giggey reviews Jennifer Gillan's 2010 book Television and New Media: Must-Click TV.

In curated lists of historically important videos, Ian Roberts discusses "Genesis of the Digital Anime Music Video Scene," and Jonathan McIntosh provides a history of pre-YouTube history of political remix. Elisa Kreisinger considers remix as a queer act. Finally, Alexandra Juhasz addresses the shallowness and triviality of remix in her "Fred Rant" video book.

Transformative Works and Cultures has released No. 8, a special guest-edited double issue comprising Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (edited by Robin Anne Reid and Sarah N. Gatson) and Textual Echoes (edited by Cyber Echoes, a collective comprising Berit Åström, Katarina Gregersdotter, Malin Isaksson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth, and Maria Helena Svensson).

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom comprises four research essays covering topics such as race, identity, and construction in fandom, gaming, and Web series.

Mel Stanfill, in "Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom," provides an interdisciplinary analysis of film and television shows to assess fandom as a form of performativity that both undercuts and reinforces white privilege.

"Fandom as Industrial Response: Producing Identity in an Independent Web Series," by Aymar Jean Christian, expands the definition of fan by analyzing a made-for-Web series based on the TV show Sex and the City.

Thomas D. Rowland and Amanda C. Barton, in "Outside Oneself in World of Warcraft: Gamers' Perception of the Racial Self-Other," provide survey results showing how gamers' racial attitudes intersect with avatar and interavatar creation.

Sun Jung, in "K-pop, Indonesian Fandom, Social Media," performs an ethnographic study, also drawing on material on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to analyze K-pop fandom from the perspective of Indonesian youth.

Textual Echoes comprises four research essays and two Symposium essays. The special issue grew out of a three-day symposium hosted by Umeå University, Sweden, which included a keynote address by TWC's own Kristina Busse.

Charles W. Hoge reads fan fic as play in "Whodology: Encountering Doctor Who Fan Fiction through the Portals of Play Studies and Ludology" by applying the criteria of theorist Roger Caillois's for game and play.

The three Praxis essays address themes of desire, sexuality, and identity in relation to fan works. Bridget Kies ("One True Threesome: Reconciling Canon and Fan Desire in Star Trek: Voyager") analyzes desire in terms of fan fic about the Tom Paris–Harry Kim–B'Elanna Torres triad.

Mark McHarry, in "(Un)gendering the Homoerotic Body: Imagining Subjects in Boys' Love and Yaoi," discusses dōjinshi, fan comics with young male characters, by performing a reading of Maldoror's Freeport (based on the anime Gundam Wing) via Grosz, Kristeva, and Foucault.

Kate Roddy's essay, "Masochist or Machiavel? Reading Harley Quinn in Canon and Fanon," discusses Harley Quinn (the Joker's girlfriend in the Batman canon) in relation to medical and feminist discourses about female submissiveness.

In the Symposium section, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth discusses The Vampire Diaries and its fan fiction in "Transmedial Texts and Serialized Narratives," assessing mythos, topos, and ethos in terms of the story world. And Nele Noppe, in "Why We Should Talk about Commodifying Fan Work," sees opportunities for fans to build hybrid economies via Web-based commerce.

TWC No. 8 also includes two book reviews: Melanie Kohnen reviews The Young and the Digital by S. Craig Watkins, and Laurie B. Cubbison reviews Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction by Rebecca Black.

The new issue of Camera Obscura: a journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies published by Duke University Press, features a special section on vidding consisting of essays written by various current and former OTW staffers Kristina Busse, Francesca Coppa, Alexis Lothian, and Rebecca Tushnet.

The essays in the section include: (the link goes to the abstract; full text is not yet available on this site for nonsubscribers.)

* Francesca Coppa, An Editing Room of One's Own: Vidding as Women's Work

* Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet, How to Suppress Women's Remix

* Kristina Busse and Alexis Lothian, Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: The Uses of Remix Video

Transformative Works and Cultures releases its seventh issue today, September 15, 2011. The new issue features a diverse array of articles: on cosplay and hurt/comfort, on music fandom, Buffy, Twilight, and Iron Man. More information beneath the cut!

The Symposium Blog, an online subsidiary of Transformative Works and Cultures recently welcomed two new new correspondents - Andrea Horbinski and Lisa Schmitt - who will be joining Alex Jenkins as regular contributors.

Andrea Horbinski was a 2007-2008 Fulbright fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto and is currently a Ph.D. student in modern Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. She hopes to write a history of manga for her dissertation. (You can read more about her and her interests at her intro post.)

Lisa Schmitt is a proud Canadian fan currently teaching media and gender courses at Bishop’s University. (Her intro post is here.)

The Symposium Blog welcomes essays from fans--and you don't have to be a professor or even play one on TV. If you are interested in contributing, please contact the editors.

Correction: This post was edited to reflect Andrea Horbinksi's correct academic affiliation.

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), the OTW's scholarly journal, has recently announced calls for papers for two upcoming issues.

The first, on Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies, will be guest-edited by Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma of Oita University. The editors are specifically looking to expand the scholarship on "BL" by seeking contributors who are engaged in the exploration of "BL" in manga, novels, animations, games, films, and so forth from non-Japanese and non-North American contexts (e.g. Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and others) as well as in a variety of theoretical contexts. An expanded version of the call for papers was recently published on TWC's Symposium Blog.

The second issue, on "Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books, will be guest-edited by Matthew Costello. The editor seeks essays on all sorts of fanworks related to comics as well as on aspects of comic fandom culture, broadly speaking; the call for papers lists a longer and more specific list of essay topics.

Remember, you don't have to be a professor to publish for TWC! In addition to the journal's Theory and Praxis sections (which are blind peer reviewed and therefore are typically scholarly works located in an extant theoretical discourse or discipline) TWC also features its own Symposium section that welcomes shorter critical essays of about 1,500–2,500 words about current developments or debates in fandom (fan community, fannish works, fan meta, fan culture); think of these pieces themselves as polished-up pieces of "fan meta." So if you have an idea for a short critical essay on either Boys' Love or Comics fandom, consider writing and essay for TWC or for The Symposium Blog. You can contact the TWC editors or Symposium editors to query articles or find out more.

(Note: We are aware of the DOI links not working. We are on it.)

March 15, 2011, sees the release of a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, guest edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, focusing on the intersection of history and fandom. The title of the special issue, "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," refers to Walter Benjamin's famous 1935 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin's essay placed ordinary people's engagement with mass-produced culture in a historical context, and that was also the goal of this special guest-edited issue. TWC No. 6 is available here.

"We didn't plan it this way, but we are alternating between special guest-edited issues and regular nonthemed issues," Karen Hellekson notes. Her TWC coeditor, Kristina Busse, adds, "Themed issues appeal to different groups of readers and authors and allow us to expand the notion of fan. We've gotten a lot of interest in all our various special issues, especially the upcoming fan advocacy and fan/remix video issues."

The History issue exemplifies this wider definition of fan. The research articles that appear in the special issue move past TWC's usual fare, which focuses on media fandom, instead contributing to a wider-ranging notion of fandom. Guest editors Reagin and Rubenstein have deep ties to fandom, and both are writing books that explore fans (and audiences more broadly) as historical actors. Reagin's research focuses on literary fandoms in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, while Rubenstein investigates movie fans and the experience of moviegoing in Mexico. Reagin, with 35 years' experience in the fan world, migrated from SF fandom to media fandom. Rubenstein was a member of her home town's science fiction club while in high school and has been, more recently, an active Harry Potter fan.

The research articles in this issue range widely in geographic and chronological focus. Courtney A. Bates discusses fan letters written to American novelist Willa Cather; Stacey Pope and John Williams address gendered and classed responses to British football (soccer) fandom; Julia Sneeringer talks about rock-and-roll fans' relationships with musicians and club owners in the Beat scene in Hamburg, Germany; and Lisa Rose Stead discusses fan letters published in Picturegoer magazine from 1913 to 1928. As Reagin and Rubenstein point out in their introduction, fans forged communities within a context of a shared activity or simultaneously consumed artwork.

In the non-peer-reviewed section of the issue, edited by TWC staffers rather than Reagin or Rubenstein, the Symposium section likewise addresses historical concerns. Catherine Coker recaps the famous 1992 Contraband Incident involving Marion Zimmer Bradley, while Mark Soderstrom explicates the relationship between historical reenactment and fandom. Three essays discuss historical preservation—that is, archiving: Regina Yung Lee, who describes the holdings at UC Riverside and interviews Melissa Conway, the library's head of special collections; Versaphile, who talks about archives and the preservation of fannish history; and Alexis Lothian, who addresses archiving of fan works at the multifandom archive associated with OTW, the Archive of Our Own.

Finally, some interviews round out this issue. TWC has long wished to host video, and the time has finally arrived, launched with five videos of fans: superfans Paula Smith and Rusty Hevelin; fan vidders Sandy and Rache, who vid as the Clucking Belles; Robert DeSimone, a Lucas-sanctioned Darth Vader; and fans associated with The Bronze, the now-defunct official site for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. These personal histories are a pioneering effort at making the fan experience available to a wider audience.

TWC No. 7, a general, nonthemed issue, is slated for release on September 15, 2011.

Interested in submitting to a future issue? Check out the submission guidelines, or ping the editors with questions or ideas. TWC is always looking for interviews and meta!

* Board member Rebecca Tushnet has posted notes from a presentation she gave on vidding at Notre Dame's Creativity and the Law Symposium, Scary Monsters: Hybrids, Mashups, and Other Illegitimate Children.

* TWC editor Kristina Busse has posted Affective Aesthetics to the Symposium Blog, a piece that argues that fan works are still discriminated against because they engage the emotions as well as the critical facility.

* The New York Times is soliciting Harry Potter fanfic from students; What Would Your Favorite Literary Characters Be Like If Their Stories Never Ended?

* Moby has founded Moby Gratis, a site which makes music available for free to makers of independent, student, and non-profit films or videos.

* Dan Pankraz's Generation C: The Connected Collective Consumer sounds an awful lot like fandom.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about you can submit it in three easy ways: comment on the most recent Link Roundup on LJ, IJ or DW, tag a link with "for:otw_news" on Delicious or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.