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fanhackers · 18 days
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Help a Researcher
Leigh Ingram, a student at the University of Ottawa, in Canada, is completing a Master of Information Studies. The proposed research for their thesis is on information seeking behaviours in the fanfiction community, with a specific focus on how AO3 users search through the archive and use the embedded search functions on the website.
This study has received ethics approval for an anonymous online survey, followed by a few interviews. The survey will remain open for approximately 6-8 weeks depending on the volume of response. Following completion of the research, the intention is to share the anonymous data collected and potentially submit an article to Transformative Works and Cultures for consideration, so any findings will be shared with OTW/AO3. 
Survey takers must be 18 or older to take part. If you would like to learn more about the study you can review its consent form, which contains the researcher's contact information.
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fanhackers · 2 months
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One example of such a title is the popular web novel Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun (2019; originally called Er Ha He Ta De Bai Mao Shi Zun—hereafter, 2ha). (…) The book was later adapted into the TV series Immortality (n.d.; originally called Hao Yi Xing). (…) According to largely unverified rumors, the series was supposedly approved by the Chinese censorship authority in February 2021 and the date of release was then officially announced to be April 15, 2021. However, since then it has been delayed numerous times and as of April 2023, it has yet to be given a release date.  The trends in posts discussed in this article additionally demonstrate the value assigned to time invested in carrying out creative activities that contribute to the maintenance of fandom unity as well as protection of the cultivated fandom experience. Despite the current lack of access to their fan object, the participants seem to exhibit characteristics typical of a devoted fandom. Fans strengthen their engagement with the fan object through performing roles of marketers and promoters. In addition, interactions among fans and with competing fandoms allow the participants to further cultivate their loyalty to the fan object. All of these behaviors contribute to uniting the fan community under one collective identity, boosting morale and making the wait for Immortality seem more worthwhile. Wrochna, Agata Ewa. 2023. "Best TV Show You Have Never Seen: Maintaining Collective Identity Among the Twitter Fandom of Chinese Dangai Drama Immortality." In "Chinese Fandoms," edited by Zhen Troy Chen and Celia Lam, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 41. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2361.
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fanhackers · 3 months
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Calling LGBTQIA+ self-insert fan fiction readers and writers!
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A fourth year student at the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) at Northwestern University is conducting a research project, “LGBTQIA+ Identity Exploration and Expression Through Self-Insert Fanfiction,” which will examine the experiences of queer and trans readers and writers with self-insert fanfiction. This research has received IRB approval and is being supported by Dr. Jolie C. Matthews, associate professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.  
If you are interested in taking part, interviewees for this project are being recruited via a screening survey  You must be 18 or older and reside in the U.S. in order to participate. Questions about the study can be directed to Yiyang Liu or to Dr. Jolie C. Matthews.
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fanhackers · 4 months
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Vidding’s Grandchildren? Edits, corecore, and other video feels
Thinking about the descendants of vidding, since I was quoted in this recent article on fan edits, “Why Do Fan-Made Trailers Rule the Internet?” by Cat Zhang. The edits of the article, like the fanvids of old, are scenes from television shows and movies set to music.  But while these edits are typically much shorter and more feels-focused than vids, they seem to me clearly a descendant of the form. In my book, Vidding: A History (2018), I talk about the ways in which YouTube and the algorithms of the internet were already affecting the aesthetics of vids back in the 2010s (spoiler alert: they’ve became shorter & more intense) and we can clearly see this trend in the 2020s now that fans are firmly on short-form platforms like Insta and Tiktok.  The edits in Zhang’s article are all about the feels, and a sub-class of edits, corecore (as explained in this Mashable article by Chance Townsend, “Explaining corecore: How TikTok’s newest trend may be a genuine Gen-Z art form”) is often used to express chaotic or overwhelmed feels.  Townsend says that what makes corecore so interesting is that “one’s feelings that couldn't be expressed through words are instead presented through images. Whether that emotion is happiness, a fear of the future, or the excitement of falling in love, corecore edits, through the use of multimedia, speak to our common experience.”  The idea of expressing emotion by the artistic act of combining disparate clips with music–well, it sounds like vidding, but at the same time it seems a long way away, too. That said, a work like this hip-hop based edit of The Bear, made by an artist at the X/Twitter account “black boy cinematic universe,” seems to be doing the kind of reparative fannish media work vis a vis race that older vids did for gender and sexuality. Zhang quotes the artist as saying: “There’s an energy to the show where it’s being carried by the people of color. So in my edit, I want to make sure there’s a song that represents that.”  That’s a very similar (and familiar) vibe: that urge to make the thing that will Get. It. Right.
–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer
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fanhackers · 4 months
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I interviewed the organizers of the Media Fandom Oral History Project, and they shared about the project and what makes it important! The project collects oral histories (interviews) from fans about their fannish experiences. Oral histories help fans define for ourselves what it means to a fan, and they help preserve our histories for future generations. 
The project needs volunteers! Email oralhistoryfandom (at) gmail (dot) com if you want to get involved. 
The full interview can be found under the cut. 
-Lianne, Fanhackers volunteer
Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself, the project, and its purpose?
Morgan Dawn: I am Morgan Dawn and have been a slash fanfiction fan since the 1990s. I entered fandom during the last years of paper fanfiction and the beginning era of online fandom. 
The Media Fandom Oral History Project’s goal is to capture our history in our own words and with our own voices. The idea came when I was sitting at our kitchen table with my friend Sandy Herrold. We realized that fans talking to other fans in informal settings was the perfect way to showcase our community and our connections. What could be more fannish than talking about and sharing the things we love? We started interviewing fans at conventions, then moved to phone interviews and have finally switched the project into a Do-It-Yourself Mode with fans taking the lead interviewing their friends and choosing what they want to preserve.
The recordings are submitted to the University of Iowa's oral history collection and are available online. We are hoping to provide transcripts for all of the interviews. The University of Iowa has one of the world's largest fanfiction fanzine collections. You can see the list of interviews at Fanlore, one of the OTW’s projects. 
Franzeska Dickson: I am Franzeska Dickson and have also been a slash fan since the 90s. In my case, I started as a 13-year-old screaming about Scully on alt.tv.x-files during the first season. (I was a NoRomo, as I recall, mostly because I thought Mulder wasn't nearly good enough for her.) I remember being floored when I was told about fanfic. I have no memory of being told that slash existed. I guess it didn't seem like a big deal. I spent the late 90s and early 00s in anime fandom before swinging back to oldschool Media Fandom and later to other Asian fandoms.
I ran into Morgan at a con and informed her that her recording plans were all wrong and she needed the type of voice recorder that linguists use in the field… I ended up with the recorder and the bulk of the early interviewing work.
Q: Speaking as if to someone unfamiliar with oral history and your project, why is the Media Fandom Oral History Project important?
MD: The recordings allow us to speak directly to future generations of fans and control the discussion of what it means to be a ‘fan.’ By having fans talk to other fans we bypass the dominant narrative of how fans interact with the TV, movies, books and comics. It is also an opportunity for marginalized members of our community to talk about their experiences. There has been much scholarship surrounding live action and anime fandoms. Some of it has been done by academics who are fans themselves and it has been wonderful to see the growth of Fandom Studies. But oral history offers every fan the ability to use their own words to talk about the things they remember and what matters to them.
FD: The early zine generation is rapidly dropping dead, and even when they aren't, I'm always running into younger fans trying to do research who have zero clue who's still alive or where to find them. If we wait for people to do their secondary academic research, it will be too late. Primary sources now or we won't have them!
The scope of fans who are interested in fandom history is much wider than the people who can make the right connections to talk to someone older. It's particularly true for early zines, but it's even true for something like Livejournal: I could rustle up thirty people in five minutes who'd be able to speak cogently on that fandom history. A lot of would-be history researchers currently in undergrad would not. For the future academics, the meta writers, or merely our curious fellow fans, it behooves us to record our history in our own words.
Q: What has the Media Fandom Oral History Project accomplished so far?
MD: We have completed 57 interviews. The first few years we went to in-person conventions and used a digital recorder to interview anyone who was interested. In 2017, a graduate student named Megan Genovese obtained funding and did 24 interviews over the phone in a single summer. During the pandemic, we moved into a DIY (do it yourself) phase - instead of a single person doing the interviewing, we now invite fans to contact their friends and spend an hour chatting about their fandom history. They can use their smartphones, Zoom/video conference recording or reserve a time slot on our international audio conference system. 
We have recorded the history of some of the earliest slash writers, publishers and artists. We have preserved the memories of the first fan who created the first fanvid using a slide project and cassette audio tape. We have heard from fans who organized conventions and started letter writing campaigns to save shows. The interviews include filk singers, fans whose passion is meta, and fans who created and ran some of the first fiction archives. These fans are creators, organizers, supporters, and devotees and have so many stories to tell.
Q: In what ways do you hope the project will grow in the coming years? Or, what are your hopes for the project's future?
MD: We’re a small project and it is difficult to scale with our current resources. By shifting to the DIY phase we’re hoping to encourage fans to take the reins of their fandom history and never stop telling their personal fannish stories. The DIY project also allows fandom communities to leverage off our existing “infrastructure” - we can offer permission forms, an international recording platform (if needed), and a place to archive the interviews.
FD: All fandom history resources suffer from a strong predilection for the researcher's friends or their part of fandom to be the main focus. I hope people from very different parts of fandom will interview their friends about areas other people haven't found important or accessible enough to record.
Q: What help is needed, and how can people get involved?
MD: We need 2 intake coordinators to answer questions, e-mail and collect permission forms (Participants must sign a permission form allowing their recordings to be archived at the University of Iowa). We also need help with outreach to communities that may not be aware of the project - anime, BL fans, cosplayers, filkers, fans in other countries. This is not just a historical project looking backwards. We want to capture our community as it is today and hear from fans whose experiences differ. The central focus has not changed - fans participating in transformative fandom - reading, writing, creating fanfiction, fanvids, podfic, art, managing discord communities. But it all starts with intake coordinators who can keep track of participants and follow up to get the recordings. Each oral history also has a written transcription, as we want this project to be as accessible to as many people as possible. We’ve tried some automated transcription services, and the results are very uneven. This means there’s another opportunity for volunteers, people to listen to the recordings and to help transcribe the contents. 
Q: Is there anything else you'd like people to know about the Media Fandom Oral History Project?
MD: It's a way for fans to be heard. They can describe their experiences on their own terms, in their own words, and take back some of the power of storytelling, rather than having others tell their stories for them.
It's a way to help preserve and honor fan experiences and fan history.
Envision you and your friends, talking about the things you love, your community, and what they mean to you, and describing and preserving these things for history. 
Plus, it's really fun!
FD: If you don't want 'fandom history' to mean just one kind of fandom history, speak up while you can, whether that's here or in essays or in your own projects!
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fanhackers · 4 months
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The whole world through queer-coloured glasses
Sometimes reading new scholarship coincides perfectly with the discussion I read here, on the blog. You have read discussion about fan perspectives on queer representation and on the fanfic lens and another take on the latter (or in other words, how to be gay).
Frederik Dhaenens writes research about gay representation on television. Their work dicusses both queer stories and queer readings which is what brought these previous posts to my mind. In queer readings, the audience was examined.
(The) regular television viewers seemed to be aware of the strategies of queer deconstruction. DHAENENS, FREDERIK. “READING GAYS ON THE SMALL SCREEN.” JAVNOST – THE PUBLIC 19, NO. 4 (2012): 57–72. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1080/13183222.2012.11009096.
However, these texts only briefly touched on queer readings that were of not explicitly queer stories.
Another example (of the distinction between the focus group with the heterosexual and the homosexual participants) is the way many gay participants stressed the necessity of identification with gay characters or at least the fun of assuming a character being gay. DHAENENS, FREDERIK. “READING GAYS ON THE SMALL SCREEN.” JAVNOST – THE PUBLIC 19, NO. 4 (2012): 57–72. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1080/13183222.2012.11009096.
Audiences are adept at reading into the text but there are also more and more queer stories. However, an analysis of queer reading practices could look at these interpretations less as separate ones as they can co-exist. After all, many of us might have experienced reading everyone else around the canonically queer couple as also queer, haven’t we?
Szabo Dorottya
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fanhackers · 5 months
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The Classics of Fan Studies: Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet
Today, I’m going to talk about a book that I always recommend to people who want to discover fan studies: Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet which is a collection of essays around fandoms edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. One of them about fanfiction as theatrical performance was even written by our very own Francesca Coppa! 
Each essay in this book can help us understand more about the inner workings of fan communities at a time when LiveJournal was at the height of its popularity and people gathered to talk about Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the early seasons of Supernatural. As someone who has always been interested in the reasons why fans turn to specific pairings, I particularly enjoy Elizabeth Woledge’s Intimatopia. It deals with the importance of homosocial relationships (social bonds between same-sex people) as a basis for slash stories. Using the example of Kirk/Spock, she explains that fans tend to focus on pairings that come from “a media source that already emphasizes homosocial bonds through the depiction of the loyalty between two men who live and work in a more or less homosocial community” (97).
If you’re interested in fan studies in general, I also recommend reading the introduction which gives a great overview of fandom at the time as well as the evolution of the discipline with a description of what came before and how the direction it was taking at the time. Busse and Hellekson also make some great points about the advantages of studying fandom when you are a fan yourself. 
Have you come across this book before? If so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments!
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fanhackers · 5 months
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Honoring Our Foresmutters: Joanna Russ
Inspired to post today by the recent New York Times article on Joanna Russ, “Joanna Russ Showed Us the Future: Female, Queer but Far From Perfect,” which promotes an exciting new collection of her work by the Library of America.  Joanna Russ was a fan and a fanfiction writer well as, arguably, the literal founder of the field of fan studies. While Russ has been referenced or namechecked many times in the Fanhackers blog over the years (here and here, for example), I don’t think we’ve ever specifically shouted out her field-founding 1985 essay “Pornography By Women For Women, With Love.”  (Is there an important fan studies essay before this one? Perhaps Ien Ang’s 1985 work on Dallas fans? Janice Radway’s 1984 Reading the Romance? Lamb and Veith? Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winstons’s 1975 landmark Star Trek Lives? Maybe that one. But Russ is pretty much the first to document and defend modern slash fandom as we know it (which is one of the reasons the NYT article links to the Archive of Our Own.)   
Russ says a lot of things in this essay about Star Trek slash, what it is and how it works, and how slash serves as a sexual fantasy for women. (She also says some pretty fascinating things about not just female rape fantasy, but also about male rape fantasy: there’s a lot of sympathy here for men’s sexual fantasy and empathy for the way men are thwarted under patriarchy as well.)  But I think my favorite thing in the essay is the way Russ is willing to own her feels:
I hope I haven't offended anyone by calling K/S "sexual fantasy." If it weren't, I wouldn't pay any attention to it. I love the stuff, I love the way it turns me on, and I love its attempt to establish a very radical androgyny in its characters. So many feminist creations of Amazons and Goddess-worshippers and so on simply don't work-most are very thin–but K/S works, if you know and like Star Trek, and (as I mentioned) it is the only sexual fantasy by women for women that's produced without the control or interposition of censorship by commercial booksellers or the interposition of political intent by writers or editors. It's also a labor of love for the women involved, since it is (and must be, because of the possibility of lawsuit) non-profit. I find it raw, blatantly female, and very valuable and exciting.
She ends the essay preparing to go back to the story she is writing!
And now, if you will excuse me, I must go back to my ancient Vulcan castle with the carved bedposts where I have left my two characters, Guess Who and Guess Which, in a very dramatic and painful situation. In fact, I left Spock preparing to beat Kirk, whom he has bought as a slave in an alternate universe in which violent Vulcan (Spock's planet) never reformed. Of course the point of the whole scene is that Spock can't bear to do any such thing because he is madly in love with Kirk. So he smites his forehead with his hand (or some similar gesture) and rushes out to agonize. Meanwhile Kirk (who's of course in love with Spock) agonizes too, but in the opposite direction, so to speak.  They will do this for a long as I can contrive, and then they will make great music together, also as long as I can stretch the scene out. Yum. And so on.
That “Yum,” in print, in 1985, is everything! 
–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer
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fanhackers · 5 months
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How do fans engage with the source material when there’s already canonical queer representation?
Rachel Marks looks at the fandoms for the DC Comics TV shows (like Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), which have been including queer characters since 2014 when the characters Sara Lance and Nyssa al Ghul shared a kiss in Arrow. Read the whole article for free, which is in the newest issue of the open access journal, Transformative Works and Cultures: “Fan perspectives of queer representation in DC's Legends of Tomorrow on Tumblr and AO3.”
Marks finds:
Fans generally appreciate and care about queer representation in Legends, but they often overlook representation of people of color. For instance, pairings with characters of color get less attention.
Canon queer pairings get the most attention, but noncanonical pairings are still common.
“In sum, Legends fans show their appreciation for canon queer representation in television by frequently featuring canonically queer characters in their posts, highlighting the positive qualities of those characters and their relationships. Fans appreciate seeing multiple LGBT characters represented on television and get enjoyment out of seeing same-sex couples being couples on screen. However, this is not all they focus on when blogging or writing fic about their favorite characters or ships. Fans want to enjoy viewing canonically queer couples and queer characters on television, but they also want to enjoy alternative interpretations in which noncanonical ships are read for their subtextual elements. Fans simultaneously enjoy watching and creating content about a show that has canonical queer representation, while continuing the queer fan tradition of forming their own interpretations of queer characters and relationships.”
-Lianne, Fanhackers volunteer
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fanhackers · 5 months
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The friends we made along the way
Discussing who the characters are and what canon is, is one of fandom’s most familiar activities.
Fan reading, however, is a social process through which individual interpretations are shaped and reinforced through ongoing discussions with other readers. Such discussions expand the experience of the text beyond its initial consumption. 
In the prevalence of this activity, we might see, not an interest in any final answer, but how the discussion itself legitimizes the existence of a canon.
It is further linked to a tendency for viewers to apply some criteria of fidelity to the adaptations, as most assume that the webtoon has canonical status and hence primacy on determining the contents and significance of the story.
At the recent Fan Studies Network North America Conference, Clark talked about negotiating a character’s key attributes even after (or even more so) as the canon material comes to an end.
Clark, John. “Pokémon, I’m Glad I Got to Meet You!: Reckoning with the End of Ash Ketchum’s Journey in the Pokémon Fandom.” In Re: Fandom – Fan Studies Network North America Conference, 2023.
Silberstein-Bamford, at the same place, discusses the strategies fans use to manage the different attributes of the same character.
Silberstein-Bamford, Fabienne. “Refine, Revise, Rethink: The Fluidity of Character in Fanfiction.” In Re: Fandom – Fan Studies Network North America Conference , 2023. 
In these discussions, we can see that the act of negotiating these character’s identity, fans, at the same time, construct said identity: if there can be a discussion about who this character is, they certainly are and their identity can be fixed – if for the length of a fic. Then again for another one. Then again.
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fanhackers · 5 months
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We have had time for the FSNNA conference experiences to settle. There were certainly some riveting talks and novel ways of presentations (including playable games) and we could watch it all in your company. This was possible because we just launched Fanhackers’ discord server. Such a novel experience for us! Let us figure the way forward together.
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fanhackers · 5 months
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When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?
At the recent FSNNA conference (were you there? Did we meet? If you’ve been there, the panel recordings and the discussion space is still available for a week.), Katherine Crighton, Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo introduced an online game where you can create new fanworks for your blorbo for the newest fannish sensation: Blow the Man Down. The catch is, this fannish sensation is not a TV show. The story is reverse engineered through the fanworks created for it, but in a sense, it doesn’t exist. Your blorbo also doesn’t exist. My blorbo is real cool, though, their name is Bogdán.
When it comes to fannish creation, there are some key theories to reference. Participatory culture is one, we also talk about gift economy, affective labor; can they possibly explain why we are able to act fannishly when there isn’t even a canon to be fans of? Are we experiencing real feelings for a fake blorbo because we participated in their creation, committing to this silly man? Or is it because of the nature of the work, we used fannish practices to create them, which is inherently affective? Or is it, as the presentation already points out, due to the spear theory: we build our blorbo by piercing many blorbos through and that creates our type? I dare you; play the game and let us discuss our experiences. Or if you’ve ever gonched, what did you think of it?
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fanhackers · 5 months
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How To Be Gay, by David M. Halperin
While there are obvious fan studies classics, there are other books that don’t always fall into the “fan studies” canon that I have found incredibly useful for my own thinking.  I cited one of them, Carol Dyhouse’s  Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017), a few posts ago; another is David Halperin’s How To Be Gay (2012)
How To Be Gay came out of a course Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, whose full title was “How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.”  The initiation in question was not sexual, but cultural:  Halperin believes that there are not only gay texts, a gay canon of sorts, but also gay ways of reading that are taught and learned and that help constitute something we might call a gay subjectivity (that you don’t have to be gay actually to have):  e.g. Hollywood movies, opera, Broadway musicals, camp, diva worship, drag, muscle culture, style, fashion, interior design. Halperin asked both why this set of things–why musicals? why this diva or that–and what do they tell us about gay experience? Halperin was trying to trace “gay men’s characteristic relation to mainstream culture,” which often involves collaborative and camp appropriation: a queering.
I find this book very useful, both because fandom also has its own shared languages and rites of initiation (consider the idea of watching something with fannish goggles or slash goggles or a fanfic lens, as was recently discussed in a previous post; think about all the languages and tropes and artistic structures we all learn from each other) but also because Halperin talks about modes of identification that aren’t representational or based obviously in identity politics. So, for example, he says that the gay male students in his class were more likely to express themselves vis a vis a shared text like  The Golden Girls than vis a vis the traditions of what Halperin calls “good gay writing.” There is, Halperin argues, a queer pleasure in the Broadway musical that’s different than the pleasures of gay identity or even gay sex; similarly, queer female fans might find pleasures in identifying with, say, Sherlock, Crowley, or Blackbeard that are very different from the pleasures offered by a woman- or lesbian-centered text. 
Here’s an excerpt that gives a good sense of the book, I think: fans might identify with this or recognize it as descriptive of their own fannish feels.  (FWIW, the italics are all his!)
[H]omosexuality is not just a sexual orientation but a cultural orientation, a dedicated commitment to certain social or aesthetic values, an entire way of being.  That distinctively gay way of being, moreover, appears to be rooted in a particular queer way of feeling. And that queer way of feeling—that queer subjectivity—expresses itself through a peculiar, dissident way of relating to cultural objects (movies, songs, clothes, books, works of art) and cultural forms in general (art and architecture, opera and musical theater, pop and disco, style and fashion, emotion and language). As a cultural practice, male homosexuality involves a characteristic way of receiving, reinterpreting, and reusing mainstream culture, of decoding and recoding the heterosexual or heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture, so that they come to function as vehicles of gay or queer meaning. It consists, as the critic John Clum says, in “a shared alternative reading of mainstream culture.” As a result, certain figures who are already prominent in the mass media become gay icons: they get taken up by gay men with a peculiar intensity that differs from their wider reception in the straight world. (That practice is so marked, and so widely acknowledged, that the National Portrait Gallery in London could organize an entire exhibition around the theme of Gay Icons in 2009.) And certain cultural forms, such as Broadway musicals or Hollywood melodramas, are similarly invested with a particular power and significance, attracting a disproportionate number of gay male fans. What this implies is that it is not enough for a man to be homosexual in order to be gay. Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.  (p. 12 - 13)
–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer
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fanhackers · 5 months
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The Classics of Fan studies: Matt Hills - Fan Culture
The classic of fan studies I want to introduce today is a theoretical overview of the discipline from 2002. Indeed, in Fan Culture, Matt Hills explores the different theories of fan culture and the methodologies that had been used by scholars before him. 
I particularly like the first chapter in which Hills challenges the idea that there is a dichotomy between passive consumers and resistant fans:
“Conventional logic, seeking to construct a sustainable opposition between the ‘fan’ and the ‘consumer’, falsifies the fan’s experience by positioning fan and consumer as separable cultural identities.”
In this chapter, he demonstrates that fans are also consumers and that depicting them as a separate group ignores the complexities and multiplicities of fandom. 
While I found this book compelling, I would only recommend it to people who have read some fan studies works already as it might be a bit complex as a first introduction to the subject. However, if you are interested in fan studies theory and methodology, this is the book for you!
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fanhackers · 5 months
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When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?
At the recent FSNNA conference (were you there? Did we meet? If you’ve been there, the panel recordings and the discussion space is still available for a week.), Katherine Crighton, Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo introduced an online game where you can create new fanworks for your blorbo for the newest fannish sensation: Blow the Man Down. The catch is, this fannish sensation is not a TV show. The story is reverse engineered through the fanworks created for it, but in a sense, it doesn’t exist. Your blorbo also doesn’t exist. My blorbo is real cool, though, their name is Bogdán.
When it comes to fannish creation, there are some key theories to reference. Participatory culture is one, we also talk about gift economy, affective labor; can they possibly explain why we are able to act fannishly when there isn’t even a canon to be fans of? Are we experiencing real feelings for a fake blorbo because we participated in their creation, committing to this silly man? Or is it because of the nature of the work, we used fannish practices to create them, which is inherently affective? Or is it, as the presentation already points out, due to the spear theory: we build our blorbo by piercing many blorbos through and that creates our type? I dare you; play the game and let us discuss our experiences. Or if you’ve ever gonched, what did you think of it?
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fanhackers · 5 months
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Participating in research about the motivation of fanfiction authors
Want to take part in a study on motivations for writing fanfiction and help out a fan studies researcher? Gaille Alyssa Stanley from the University of Cyberjaya (UOC), Malaysia has received approval from their Ethics Review Board for their study and is looking for fans 18 years old and above who write and publish fanfiction online without receiving monetary profit.
The online questionnaire is 14 questions and estimated to take 1 hour. All information will remain private and confidential. The information will not be disclosed to anyone other than the researcher and supervisor. The data will be collected anonymously and no personal data (e.g., name and address) will be required, except for email address as a means of communication. The data of the study will be used solely for research purposes and will not be shared to any external parties.
You can find out more about the study and access contact information at the consent form link.
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fanhackers · 6 months
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The Japanese Paper Film Project
Acafans, vidders, and fair use advocates might know film studies professor Eric Faden as the maker of A Fair-y Use Tale, a mashup of Disney films used to explain copyright law and fair use.  We were often on the same panels  on the fair use/ remix video circuit of about ten years ago, and I am a huge fan of his work. I’m currently writing something about his video essay Amuse-Oil, which speaks to me deeply as a vid-fan and vid-scholar: it’s an essay about looking where you’re not supposed to look in the frame. (We know a lot about that!)
But it’s Faden’s most recent work that I want to bring to fandom’s attention: he and his team have been working on preserving a number of Japanese films from the 1930s that were shot on paper–yes, paper!--instead of celluloid. And he’s just launched a website, The Japanese Paper Film Project, about these fascinating early movies.  Fans of anime and/or Japanese cinema (or just animation more broadly! Or cinema made with strange materials!)  might be interested in seeing these films, which are in the process of being scanned so they can be viewed.  
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Some of the films even have soundtracks on 78 records: you can see a sample here. 
–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer
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