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.

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!

Several essays in this issue focus on the nature of performance: Jen Gunnels and Carrie J. Cole, in "Culturally Mapping Universes: Fan Production as Ethnographic Fragments," consider fans as what they call ethnodramaturgs, thus emphasizing the performative aspect of fan creation and interpretation; and Nicolle Lamerichs's "Stranger than Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay" analyzes the performance and play inherent in costuming and cosplay.

Two essays focus on music fandom: Kristine Weglarz's "Lifting the Curse: Pearl Jam's 'Alive' and 'Bushleaguer' and the Marketplace of Meanings" analyzes Pearl Jam's fan reaction to an overtly political statement, where the band removed ambiguity of interpretation. Lucy Bennett, in "Delegitimizing Strategic Power: Normative Identity and Governance in Online R.E.M. Fandom," analyzes Murmurs, a fan site, and its self-policing attempt to normalize fan behavior.

Two essays focus on particular fandoms. Amanda L. Hodges and Laurel P. Richmond, in "Taking a Bite out of Buffy: Carnivalesque Play and Resistance in Fan Fiction," apply Bakhtinian theory to fan fiction. Jacqueline Marie Pinkowitz, in "'The rabid fans that take [Twilight] much too seriously': The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom," analyzes a specific antifan group and the way they present themselves as arbiters of taste.

The Symposium essays in this issue take on the genre of hurt/comfort (Judith May Fathallah, "H/c and Me: An Autoethnographic Account of a Troubled Love Affair"), perform a close reading of _Iron Man_ fan fic (Hui Min Annabeth Leow, "Subverting the Canon in Feminist Fan Fiction: 'Concession'"), apply the medieval concept of the lover to assess old and new ways of collaboration (Vera Keller, "The 'Lover' and Early Modern Fandom"), and confront TWC's ethical guidelines (Francesca Musiani, "Editorial Policies, 'Public Domain,' and Acafandom").

Two book reviews of timely titles round out the issue: Nancy K. Baym's Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010, reviewed by Elizabeth Ellcessor) and Sarah Lynne Bowman's The Function of Role-Playing Games (McFarland, 2010, reviewed by Sean Duncan).

TWC No. 8, a special double guest-edited issue on Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (Sarah Gatson and Robin Anne Reid) and Textual Echoes (Berit Åström, Katarina Greggersdotter, Malin Isaksson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth, and Maria Svensson), is slated for release on November 15, 2011. In 2012, look for two more guest-edited issues in addition to our usual September general issue: Remix/Fan Video (Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo) and Fan Activism (Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova).

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!

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!