fanhackers

[fanhackers]

All New, All Different? : A History of Race and the American Superhero

Today’s scholarly excerpt comes from All New, All Different? A History of Race and the American Superhero by Allan W. Austin and Patrick l. Hamilton (U Texas Austin, 2019), a book that broadly discusses race and ethnicity across the history of comics, particularly Asian villains and nonwhite sidekicks but also focusing on the way mixed ethnic heroic groups were both collections of stereotypes and also attempts at being liberatory/inclusive/diverse in a particularly American way.

While studies that isolate a particular ethnic or racial group make important contributions, this book takes a different but complementary approach: charting the largely unexplored terrain of a more broadly inclusive history of race and the American superhero, with all its complexity and contradictions. In this, we strive to present the patterns of racial and ethnic representation more generally in comics and superhero popular culture, the attitudes from which they emanate, and those they seek to cultivate. Scholars’ still somewhat qualified understanding of superhero popular culture and race is especially ironic given that racial and ethnic representations were inherent, both figuratively and literally, within early comics and comic strips. As David Hajdu has pointed out, the Yellow Kid, the late nineteenth- century trailblazer for newspaper comic strips, spoke in a clichéd ethnic hodgepodge and hung out with others who were nothing more than gross stereotypes of Italian, African American, and Middle Eastern cultures. But though stereotypes ruled the strip (and in many ways the art form) from the start, these early newspaper entertainments also came to belong to ethnic immigrants. As Hajdu importantly notes, the “early newspaper comics spoke to and of the swelling immigrant populations in New York and other cities where comics spread, primarily through syndication (although locally made cartoons appeared in papers everywhere). The funnies were theirs, made for them and about them.” As the earliest strips revolved around immigrants and outsiders, so too did the early comic book industry. In 1937, when the studio run by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger opened, it employed writers and artists who felt like outsiders: immigrants, women, native-born Americans of every ethnic stripe, and others on the margins of society. Of course, these outsiders wanted in, and, Hajdu argues, Superman represented their assimilation. Whereas the Yellow Kid, in at least one sense, celebrated ethnic immigrants, Superman embodied their casting off their cultures for a more mainstream “American” identity. Aldo J. Regalado echoes Hajdu, describing comics as the way in which immigrant (largely Jewish) creators “negotiated their way into the cultural mainstream” via not only their characters but, ultimately, the industry they helped create.10 Such a development was hardly surprising, and is actually fairly typical of the immigrant experience writ large. Given how comics in general and their first superhero in particular base themselves in patterns of immigrant history and experience, scholars ought to pay even greater attention to both because they provide a unique window into evolving attitudes about race and inclusion in the United States.

[fanhackers]

The social life of bookmark tags

Paratext (on the Internet) has historically been used, not only for folksonommy, but for social functions, too. This is true for websites that have a broader range of social media-like features, such as comments, likes and private messages and for those that lack one or more of these. However, Bourlai observes differences in how paratext is used and ties it to the above features of the site:

Since Tumblr does not have a separate comment section for posts, the tag section may also be used for tags with discourse functions such as expressing an opinion, a reaction, or including asides. (…) The results suggest that social tagging practices on Tumblr are influenced by both the technological specifications of the platform and the social structure of the website. E. Bourlai: “Comments in Tags, Please!: Tagging practices on Tumblr”

Those interested in fandom might instantly think about the paratext and especially the tags of Archive of Our Own. The archive, will providing commenting options, the post themselves serve no social function in theory. It is all the more telling, what communicative functions the different elements of a post serve. While the post itself would need to contain the fanwork only, a space known as Author’s Notes is provided where the users can communicate additional information. However, users still relegate some of this information to the comments.

Comment tags play no role in enhancing the visibility and searchability of a post and would not be considered metadata labels like keyword tags. They are part of the content and would normally be included in the body section of a post. By placing part of the content in the tag section, users indicate a logical or structural division in the post.  E. Bourlai: “Comments in Tags, Please!: Tagging practices on Tumblr”

This logical separation is so embedded in fannish practices that folksonomical functions and social functions have become entangled where we see some messages becoming codified (i wrote this instead of sleeping), while some tags might start out with intending to categorize the post but end up in a conversation with the reader (Hua Tuo would regret featuring in this fic, Lin Chen regrets nothing). These suggest that a tracing of historical development of tags would be possible. It also suggests an awareness on the users’ part for what is more fitting as an Author’s Note and what is more fitting as a tag. Two further quote might highlight the significance of this awareness.

As can be seen from the examples shown above, particularly on Tumblr and AO3, these motivations can result in rich tagging practices, that evidence the fan community’s desire to share and engage widely with one another, as well as to accurately and usefully organise and classify their works. Price, L. and Robinson, L.: “Tag analysis as a tool for investigating information behaviour: comparing fan-tagging on Tumblr, Archive of Our Own and Etsy”

While some of these activities are not necessarily „important” in themselves, they are the enabling conditions for fan cultural productions and for the construction of fandom as a social community. Jenkins, H. Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge.

Author: Szabó Dorottya

[fanhackers]

In Praise of a Classic Text: Understanding Comics - Part II

Last week I posted about Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics - which, among many interesting arguments, postulates that when you look at a realistic drawing of a face, you see another, where when you look at a more simply drawn cartoon image  - a smiley face, Charlie Brown, Minnie Mouse - you see yourself.  I talked about the implication of that for certain kinds of fan art, and today I want to talk about a second interesting implication - specifically in terms of fannish identification with a character.

Interesting implication the Second: There’s a great book called How To Be Gay by David Halperin  - (I did a Fanhackers post about it a couple of years ago) - in which he argues that his gay male students seemed to enjoy coded queer works - e.g. Broadway musicals, Hollywood melodramas, The Golden Girls, Steel Magnolias, Judy Garland and Adele, etc. - more than they enjoyed what Halperin calls “good gay writing,”  - that is, “fiction about gay men written by gay men that gave voice to the gay male experience.” As I wrote in my Halperin post (and as I wrote about at length in my article, “Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton” in Booth’s Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies) this makes perfect sense to me as a fangirl - many female fans find more to identify with in Spock or Mulder or Sherlock or Aziraphale than they do in female characters in serious literary novels who are dealing realistically with the problems that they face.  That sounds like…a whole boatload of no fun, to be honest. (Personal sidebar: Do I want to read a serious literary novel about the travails of a female, middle-aged English Professor like myself? I do not. FWIW I basically had to be forced to watch even fluff like The Chair, and only because I knew everyone would ask me about it. I also personally don’t enjoy an academic AU, YMMV.  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t find places of strong identification in the TV I watch and the fic that I read - it’s just not straight-up literal like that.) 

But I think it’s McCloud who gives us the WHY of this phenomenon when he talks about how realist faces read as “another,” while more simply drawn faces provoke identification.  There’s a way in which “good gay writing”  - the voice of the gay experience - can feel disappointingly NOT YOUR EXPERIENCE - because of course there is not a single gay experience, and what you are likely to read is distorted by time and distance and age. I see it with my students, for whom the gay experience of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s might as well be ancient Egypt - (or may be less familiar than ancient Egypt, Egypt kind of being its own fandom.)  Anyway a lot of gay writing doesn’t speak to their problems or their issues, and while they’re interested in it, they don’t identify with it - and that can be really hard when you’re young and queer and feeling isolated, to feel like you don’t even relate to the people you are supposed to relate to. But in an odd way, the cartoons - the coded figures - don’t go out of style the same way. And they are places of broad identification over generations: We can all be Mama Rose or Dr. Frank N. Furter or sing “I Will Survive” – because it’s a metaphor (for being closeted, for being monstrous, for surviving, etc.) It doesn’t age the same way as, for instance, the novels of Ethan Mordden or Edmund White or plays like The Boys in the Band or Torch Song Trilogy. There’s a great passage in Stacy Wolf’s book, A Problem like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, where Wolf, a lesbian, talks about driving cross-country in a convertible singing, “My Man,” (“Can’t Help…Loving That Man of Mine!”) which, she claims, provoked her to write her book about lesbian readings of the musical. In short, Steven Universe can do work that “good gay writing” cannot–and so can fandom, with its cartoon heroes, animated and live action both.

[fanhackers]

In Praise of a Classic Text: Understanding Comics - Part I

I debated writing this post, because I tend to assume everyone knows Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics - but then again, it’s not often cited as a classic fan studies text, though it absolutely is, and a key. Not only is it a fantastic theoretical and practical explainer of the art form of comics in general - and so is a crucial text to comics fandom, as well as all kind of fan art - but I think it is useful for fandom broadly because of its description of storytelling technique and, even more specifically, its understanding of identification.

McCloud argues (for example on the page below the cut) that readers identify more strongly with a more roughly-sketched face - in its most basic form, a smiley face - than with a fully-fleshed out, realistic or photorealistic portrait.  In other words, we all see ourselves in a smiley face - or, for example - in somebody simply drawn like Charlie Brown - whereas if we see a very specifically drawn person, McCloud says we see the other–another, one who is not-me.  

I believe this and I think it has a couple of interesting implications for fandom. 

Interesting Implication the First:  There is a way in which fan art tends to create a kind of quick, cartoonish iconography for popular fannish characters that can–not rival, it’s not a competition!--but provide a very different kind of fannish pleasure than a very realistically drawn image.  To be an old, and draw on an old fannish frames of reference like Stargate Atlantis, there is a way in which John Sheppard is represented by a particular flip of upswept messy black hair that makes him - (hear me out!) - look different from actor Joe Flanagan; similarly, Rodney McKay is characterized by his sandy brown hair, heart shaped <strike>ass</strike> face, and slash of a mouth.  See chkc's wonderful chibi McShep below:

Chibi Mcshep - 2010-05-02 - Uniform (0 words) by chkc Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay Additional Tags: Fanart, Chibi Summary: John smooches Rodney while in uniform.

I would argue that a fanartist working in a mode like this makes Sheppard more rather than less real–in a way, the further Sheppard gets from Flanagan, the realer he is, and the closer he is to the John Sheppard who took up a lot of real estate in my mind for a while there. Who is NOT Joe Flanigan, and who can disappear for me if he looks too much LIKE Joe Flanigan. (Similarly: Han Solo is not Harrison Ford!  Misha is not Cas! Etc. )  YMMV of course, and certainly there is wonderful realistic art, but I think that fan art serves a lot of different purposes, and there’s something wonderful about more iconographic art…

Next week: Interesting Implication the Second!

[fanhackers]

Joy: The Interdisciplinary Edition

I am always on the lookout for academic works that talk about the kinds of joy that I feel are characteristic of fandom. There are a lot of books about art, literature, music, etc. but their analysis doesn’t often take into account the pleasures of those activities (Barthes notwithstanding.)

One book that I like a lot for the way in which it conceptualizes joy in collectivity is William H. McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.  McNeill says something that, to me, is obviously true but rarely said: that people like to move together! The book is about the emotional bonding that happens when people move, together, in time: McNeill’s two examples are dance and drill (by which he means military drill - so Beyonce gives us a two-fer with Formation! ) Obviously this is a pleasure familiar to anyone who likes dance of any kind, or synchronised swimming, or drum circles, or marching bands, or yoga or tai chi, or participating in church services, or cheerleading, or doing the wave. I used McNeill in my Vidding book–but I also think of fandom’s love of a good power walk on any TV show! (For a great example check out the last few beats of the Clucking Belles’ Vid “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness”, below - power walks are the subject of the last section.)

Some orienting quotes from the start of the book: 

Reflecting on my odd, surprising, and apparently visceral response to close-order drill, and recalling what little I knew about war dances and other rhythmic exercises among hunters and gatherers, I surmised that the emotional response to drill was an inheritance from prehistoric times, when our ancestors had danced around their camp fires before and after faring forth to hunt wild and dangerous animals…. (p.3)

The specifically military manifestations of this human capability are of less importance than the general enhancement of social cohesion that village dancing imparted to the majority of human beings from the time that agriculture began.  Two corollaries demand attention. First, through recorded history, moving and singing together made collective tasks far more efficient. Without rhythmical coordination of the muscular effort required to haul and pry heavy stones into place, the pyramids of Egypt and many other famous monuments could nnot have been built.  Second, I am convinced that long before written records allowed us to know anything precise about human behavior, keeping together in time became important for human evolution, allowing early human groups to increase their size, enhance their cohesion, and assure survival by improving their success in guarding territory, securing food, and nurturing the young. (p.4)

Our television screens show continuing pervasive manifestations of the human penchant for moving together in time. American football crowds, South African demonstrators, patriotic parades, and religious rituals of every description draw on the emotional effect of rhythmic movements and gestures. So of course do dancing, military  drill, and the muscular exercises with which, it is said, workers in Japanese factories begin each day. Yet, so far as I can discover, scientific investigation of what happens to those who engage in such behavior remains scant and unsystematic. (p. 5)

[fanhackers]

 Acafannish Sampler: Otherwise Titled, “Three Things Make a Post”

Below find excerpts from three essays in A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, edited by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa 2021). These essays are on subjects that, to my mind, are under-researched: fan art, Black cosplay, and quantitative approaches to fandom:

“Unfortunately, while fan studies scholarship boasts a growing stack of books, chapters, and journal articles on fan fiction, fan art remains comparatively understudied. The extant writings tend to focus on specific instances of fan art creation instead of considering fan art more broadly or theoretically. This seems like a strange oversight, as the explosion of fan art has occurred alongside that of fan fiction, taking advantage of many of the same social media spaces, technologies, and fan communities. Fan art is a social practice, a frequent means of transcultural communication, an engaged response to media, a visual text, and sometimes a physical object. By studying fan art, we can learn a great deal about the fan communities who produce and share it. 

An important characteristic of fan art as a genre is that it is generally designed to be read, that is, for a viewer to recognize and understand what it is meant to represent and reference. Iconography is a key tool for understanding how much of this readability functions. Art historian Erwin Panofsky defined iconography as that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form. This chapter considers the role of iconography in making fan art readable, as well as looking at how this iconography can develop and what these iconographic choices can tell us about fans and fandoms.”  

–EJ Nielsen, “The Iconography of Fan Art”

~ ~ ~

“In this chapter, I shed light on the activities of Black cosplayers usually rendered invisible because of their racialized performance of cosplay. The performance and skill of Black fans tend to go unheard, so I focus on the Black cosplayer movement, where Black cosplayers attempt to be seen by the general public and each other. The focus on Black cosplay provides a deeper understanding of identity performance in fandom and cultural studies more broadly. I begin by summarizing what cosplay is and the work done in the fandom studies field that can help us understand how Black fans interact with cosplay and the struggles they face. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the tweets and images posted since 2015 under the hashtag #28DaysOfBlackCosplay. This movement shows how the online Black fan community uses cosplay to resist the hierarchical structure in fandoms and gain visibility.” 

–Alex Thomas, “The Dual Imagining: Afrofuturism. Queer Performance, and Black Cosplayers”

~ ~ ~

“Fan studies has always been robustly interdisciplinary. Its methodological and epistemological diversity should be celebrated and expanded. This chapter attempts to do both by presenting a case for the increased role of quantitative and computational tools and methods and for the kind of data-informed approaches to fandom and fanworks they make possible. Such approaches have struggled to find any real purchase in the field, which is somewhat puzzling given content industries’ increasing emphasis on the “datafication” of media audiences in general and fannish audiences in particular. Fan studies will need to engage with this trend and its ramifications, as well as with the algorithmic culture of which they are both cause and effect. The value of quantitative and computational tools and methods is hardly confined to this one area. On the contrary, when thoughtfully applied to data generated by and about fans, fandom, and fanworks, these tools and methods are very likely to make visible patterns, trends, relationships, networks, and (dis)continuities therein that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to discern.” 

--Josh Stenger, “The Datafication of Fandom: Or How I Stopped Watching the DC Arrowverse on The CW and Learned to Mine Fanwork Metadata”

[fanhackers]

Before Fanfiction: Recovering  the Literary History of American Media Fandom

I want to give a shout-out to Alexandra Edwards’s Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (Louisiana State University Press, 2023), a book which takes on the admirable task of challenging the “fandom creation myths” that see the beginning of fandom in Star Trek or Sherlock Holmes and instead connects American media fandom back to American women’s literary cultures of the 19th century. This makes for a provocative and fascinating read, especially if you’re a literary type or an English-oriented aca-fan.

Edwards identifies a number of 19th century literary activities and recasts them as fan practices: there are chapters on book clubs, fan magazines, fan mail, and fan tourism. But my favorite chapter is Edwards’s last, “Fandom is Literary, Fandom is Historical.” In it, she reads “Nella Larsen’s 1930 story ‘Sanctuary’ as a proto-example of ‘racebending,’ a practice in which a fanfiction author or artist reimagines the white characters of a text as people of color. Edwards sees Larsen as engaging in “the purposeful transformation of a text, meant to draw out both the similarities and the differences between the lives of the British laboring class and African Americans in the Jim Crow South” (141), rewriting a previous tale with deliberate thought so as to explore “how a narrative changes when its characters are Black Americans instead of poor white British.” This chapter is, I think, an important connection between contemporary ideas of fanfiction and the larger transformation of texts, particularly by marginalized groups in search of representation and understanding. In my opinion, “Fandom is Literary, Fandom is Historical”  is an absolute must-read for fan studies scholars, literary scholars, Americanists and Africana Studies folks alike.

It’s a long and winding road from the ruined plantations between Merton and Shaboro to Wakanda, and Nella Larsen certainly didn’t make the journey alone. “Sanctuary” is just one entry in a body of archontic literature still pushing against the white authority of the culture industry. Moreover, I don’t deny that, as contemporary fan studies scholars assert, “fandom is complicated.” Though I have grouped the above examples together to suggest the shifting ways that corporate media responds to fan practices like racebending, neither racebent fanworks nor “inclusive” casting are inherently antiracist practices. Samira Nadkarni and Deep Sivarajan have explored the “limits of racebending,” a practice they argue “exists parallel to the practice of deraced casting in theatre, television, and film” (122). Both practices, they find, can “inadvertently create or further systems of violence within racial and cultural hierarchies” (124).  Furthermore, as Rukmini Pande points out in the context of the new Star Wars films, even fan communities that see themselves as “progressive” can react to diversified media properties in ways that are implicitly or explicitly racist (9-14) . We do well always to keep in mind that the transformative project that connects Nella Larsen to award-winning Black superhero stories is the same transformative project that made the letter columns of Amazing Stories a gathering place for anti-Semites and white supremacists. (Edwards, 143).

[fanhackers]

Special Pre-Tony Awards Post

OK, a little bit of a self-plug here, but there’s so much great work in Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-first Century (2025), edited by Kirsty Sedgman, Matt Hills, and me.  Theatre Fandom is the first book to really cross audience and fan studies and think of theatre fans as fans in a fandom. It’s part of the University of Iowa’s Fandom and Culture Series, which includes books such as Bridget Kies and Megan Connor’s Fandom, the Next Generation (2022), Katherine Anderson Howell’s Disability and Fandom (2024) and Rukmini Pande’s Fandom, Now in Color (2020). In addition to more theoretical essays about what fandom and fannish behavior looks like in theatre as opposed to TV or film, there are also essays on particular theatrical fandoms from a broad array of scholars from the US and the UK. Ruth Foulis writes about how Harry Potter fandom was extended by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Louie Lang Norman writes about A Very Potter Musical. Sarah K. Whitfield has an essay on Hamilton fandom as a site of bisexual representation, and Emily Garside writes about being a Rent fan for decades. Laura MacDonald writes about East Asian fans who reproduce and cosplay their favorite Western musical theatre shows, and playwright Dominique Morisseau talks to Kirsty Sedgman about how black fans in particular are policed as theatrical audiences (sadly relevant this week with the Patti LuPone/ Audra McDonald/Kecia Lewis fued flaring up again.) (IYKYK.)

And that’s just some of what’s in the book.  All the scholars involved hope that this book will generate lots more scholarship on theatre and fandom.  Everyone knows that theatre kids (and theatre grownups!) are hugely fannish (this was absolutely why Glee was pitched to media fans), and yet there’s so little scholarly literature about fandom in theatre. What there is is mostly in Shakespeare studies: books like Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom (2020) by Johnathan Pope and The Shakespeare Multiverse  by Louise Geddes and Valerie M. Fazel.  Agata Luksa has written about Polish theatre fans in the 19th Century. Nemo Martin has written about the construction of race in online Les Mis fandom.  Trevor Boffone is writing about musical theatre fandom on TikTok.  But we need more, much much more!  

As we say in the book’s introduction:

Where, you might be wondering, is the chapter on Phans? What about the Hedheads (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the Fansies (Newsies), the Fun Homies (Fun Home), the Maggots (Matilda), the Jekkies (Jekyll and Hyde), or the Ozians (Wicked)? Where is the fringe show cum hit BBC TV series cum celebrated theatre production Fleabag? Such absences may inspire future work, we hope, and we certainly call for it.

I mean, Sondheim is totally a fandom, right? (Sing out, Louise!)

--Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[fanhackers]

[Survey] Content Management on Archive of Our Own

Carol Zhang, a second year Masters of Digital Arts and Humanities student at the University of British Columbia Okanagan is doing research on Archive of Our Own under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Cinnamon. This research is specifically examining how users interact with the archive’s tagging system and how their wider Internet usage could impact that. Part of this research is the survey - available on this link - for which Zhang is looking for participants.

The survey is anonymous and it takes 10-15 minutes to fill out. It will be available on the above link until January 20th. Participants must be at least 18 years old. More information about how the responses will be stored can be found in the consent form and if you have any further questions, you can contact Carol Zhang at the email address zcarol@mail.ubc.ca.

The results of the research will be available through the university’s thesis archive, cIRcle.

If you are interested in talking about content management tools and your experience navigating the archive and you are eligible, consider contributing to the research by filling out the survey.

[fanhackers]

Rogue Archives, by Abigail De Kosnik

In my last two posts, I revisited some aspects of De Kosnik’s dissertation,  Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture;  this week, I’d like to give an excerpt of her book Rogue Archives (MIT 2016). One of the things that I like about the book is the way in which it not only documents the voices of fandom but captures the feels of fandom; consider this section of the book subtitled “The Moment of Discovery””

One of the strongest themes that emerged in my research team’s interviews with fans was their strong and positive affective response when they first found online fan fiction archives. I will call this initial encounter, described by so many interviewees, the moment of discovery. Alexis Lothian, remembering her moment of discovery, which took place in 2003 when she stumbled upon Harry Potter fan fiction, says, “I loved it. I was incredibly—it was exciting. … Definitely it was a very visceral excitement” (Lothian 2012b). nightflier states that her moment of discovery, which was the first time she came across the Gossamer archive in the late 1990s, “was like a revelation. I’ll never forget that day” (nightflier 2012). eruthros, using similar terminology as Lothian, recalls that she “sort of stumbled into some sort of online fandom, I think it might have been Due South first, and the Due South mailing list … and archive,” and says that “thirty seconds after I found the archive I found slash fandom and decided that was pretty awesome, and I wanted to be there” (eruthros and thingswithwings 2012). oxoniensis also employs the metaphor of “stumbling” to characterize her moment of discovery, with Lord of the Rings fan fiction, in 2002: “My first contact with fan fiction was an accident. I’d never heard of fan fiction, either by word of mouth or online, so it was all rather a surprise when I first stumbled across it. … Some stories were moving, some funny, some incredibly hot, some utterly gripping. And to be able to find this all just by searching the Internet was wonderful” (oxoniensis 2012). oxoniensis says she feels “very nostalgic” about “those heady first days of discovery.” Like Lothian, eruthros, and oxoniensis, Robin Nelson remembers her moment of discovery as happening by chance. “It was pure accident,” says Nelson (2012) of finding a Usenet group dedicated to Anne Rice fan fiction in 1996 or 1997. “I didn’t know that fanfic even existed at that point. … I was actually thrilled. I was elated.”

De Kosnik connects this feeling to the idea of the archive - not just the Archive of Our Own, but any archive, any large grouping of stories.  As she explains, the very number of stories online is thrilling and validating:

The size of online fan fiction archives (which I explore in the conclusion)—the number of stories housed on these sites, and the number of authors who contributed them—gave Lothian, Nelson, Victoria P., and others a “sense of belonging,” a feeling of recognition (“I GET IT”), and the security of knowing that they were not alone. In other words, if these sites had not been archives, had not immediately given the impression of being well-stocked repositories, trafficked by many writers and readers, then they may not have not have communicated to fans the same aura of safety—safety in numbers, safety in being among “like-minded individuals, safety in standing with others.” (151)

I GET IT!

--Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[fanhackers]

Fandom Friendships Editing Challenge

Fandom is all about community and the friends we’ve made along the way! To celebrate the upcoming Fanhackers Fandom Friendships zine, we’ll be running a brand-new editing challenge on the Fanlore wiki from November 11th through 24th. Complete tasks by adding content to community-themed articles and earn badges for your edits!

You can learn more on how to participate in our Fandom Friendships Challenge guide!

Don’t forget to also check out the zine’s submission page! If your fandom friendships have shaped your experience as a fan, consider submitting to the zine, which is open until November 30th.

If this is your first time editing Fanlore, you can also check out our New Visitor Portal and tutorial pages to learn how to get started, or join our Discord server to chat with other Fanlore editors!

We hope to meet you on the pages of Fanlore, and happy editing!

[fanhackers]

Our shared Editing Challenge with Fanlore starts today! This week is all about Fandom Friendships!

Fanhackers

Fandom Friendships Challenge

Fanhackers is about the discussion of ideas on fandom and one of the core ideas is about the friends we’ve made along the way. From November 11th to 24th, join us and Fanlore in a brand-new collaboration to add content to community themed articles on Fanlore! The theme is choosen to celebrate our upcoming Fandom Friendships zine, which you can learn more about here.

You can learn more abou thow to participate in the Fandom Friendships Challenge guide. If this is your first time editing Fanlore, you can also check out Fanlore's New Visitor Portal and tutorial pages to learn how to get started. And if you’d like to consult with the other editors before, during and after the event, feel free to join Fanlore's Discord server where you can chat with other Fanlore folks and ask any questions you may have. We hope to meet you on the pages of Fanlore and happy editing!

[fanhackers]

Fanhackers

Fandom Friendships Challenge

Fanhackers is about the discussion of ideas on fandom and one of the core ideas is about the friends we’ve made along the way. From November 11th to 24th, join us and Fanlore in a brand-new collaboration to add content to community themed articles on Fanlore! The theme is choosen to celebrate our upcoming Fandom Friendships zine, which you can learn more about here.

You can learn more abou thow to participate in the Fandom Friendships Challenge guide. If this is your first time editing Fanlore, you can also check out Fanlore's New Visitor Portal and tutorial pages to learn how to get started. And if you’d like to consult with the other editors before, during and after the event, feel free to join Fanlore's Discord server where you can chat with other Fanlore folks and ask any questions you may have. We hope to meet you on the pages of Fanlore and happy editing!

[fanhackers]

Hi there! I just wanted to double-check that your Fandom Friendships zine is still open for submissions? Someone had pointed me in the direction of your post about it and I just wanted to double-check! If it's alright, I may send more questions via email if I receive an answer to this ask!

Yes, submissions are still open! They're open until November 30. Feel free to email fanhackers@transformativeworks.org with more questions!

[fanhackers]

Fandom/Activism

I interrupt my dive into Abigail DeKosnik’s work to note that as the United States moves deeper into its (apparently endless) election season, we’re seeing a lot of fandom-as-activism starting to emerge, as well as activism-as-fandom. De Kosnik herself was one of the early writers on fandom/activism, writing “Participatory democracy and Hillary Clinton's marginalized fandom” for the very first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures in 2008; more recently, Aja Romano wrote about how Donald Trump’s followers can be seen to be acting like a fandom for Vox: “If you want to understand modern politics, you have to understand modern fandom.” 

TWC hosted an entire guest issue on Transformative Works and Fan Activism, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova; Jenkins and Shresthova also collaborated on By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (NYU, 2016) which collects essays on fan activism. Other essays on fandom/activism have been published by TWC with Alex Xanthoudakis’s Mobilizing minions: Fan activism efficacy of Misha Collins fans in "Supernatural" fandom (2020) and  Hannah Carilyn Gunderman’s Fan geographies and engagement between geopolitics of Brexit, Donald Trump, and Doctor Who on social media (2020) being recent examples. Meanwhile, Tanya Cook and Kayle Joseph are the authors of Fandom Acts of Kindness: A Heroic Guide to Activism, Advocacy, and Doing Chaotic Good (Penguin Randomhouse 2023), a guide on how to use fandom and fannish strategies to make a difference. 

Some examples of fandom/activism emerging this U.S. election season include Heroes 4 Harris: Kamala-Con  which is scheduled to happen online today, Sunday September 8, 2024, 1pm PT / 4pm ET: this is billed as “a Comic-Con for Kamala” and “the largest fandom led gathering in support of a presidential candidate in American history.” It will feature: “actors, writers, directors, and super fans of Hollywood's most inspiring heroic fandoms” and promises not just inspiration from some of our favorite stars (Mark Ruffalo, Sean Astin, Rosario Dawson and others - not to mention Henry Jenkins himself) but also breakout groups and training in “fan mobilization.”  

Meanwhile, Lynda Carter (always a Wonder Woman!) is also trying to get out the fan vote for Harris with her group Geeks & Nerds for Harris Walz (@GeekOutTheVote); this is also billed as “a fan activist campaign” and they are planning special online events, the first of which will be an online call on September 24, 2024.  As they describe on their website: “Fandom has never just been about media consumption. Fans are artists, creators, and digital ambassadors. When we share what we love, it radiates around the world. And to paraphrase the Vice President, it’s how we show them who we are. By connecting battle-tested campaign canvassing strategies to the heritage and practices of fan communities, we can encourage fans to get out the vote in key battleground states.”

Donald Trump, aside from being his own fandom with himself as fan in chief, also seems to have had some self-identified fandoms collectively organizing for him over the years - these include Fans of Kanye West, Fans of Race Car Driving, and, strange but true, Fans of the 1980s, who apparently believe that Donald Trump would also be a fan of 80s horror movies, Scritti Politti, and  the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink. (I’m not making that up; it’s on their Twitter.) That said, Mel Stanfill’s newest book Fandom is Ugly (2024) argues that, despite its popular reputation, media fandom is not essentially progressive; that in fact, “reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand.” Stanfill’s book looks at the ways in which fans have organized in conservative, reactionary, or even hateful ways, from Gamergate to the collective abuse and harassment of actors in the latest Star Wars franchise. 

The discipline of fandom studies is now being used to study all different kinds of affiliations and advocacy movements, not just those based around film, tv, sports, or music. Fan studies is now applied to political and social movements. Jenkins is still a powerful voice on the relationship between fan studies and participatory democracy (whether progressive or reactionary): read this 2024 interview with him published in Communication and the Public: “The path from participatory culture to participatory politics: A critical investigation—An interview with Henry Jenkins.”  As Jenkins notes:

Part of the ethos of fandom is to ask questions—from nitpicking to imagining other outcomes, different trajectories for character arcs, and other worlds where the story might occur, all of which is expressed through fan works. I would say that fans are often more critical than the general audience in asking these questions, which makes them somewhat different from many partisans and activists I might know who rarely question their beliefs and ideological commitments. And fans are more tolerant—as an aggregate—of different interpretations than partisans are of different ideological stances. So, you could do worse in grounding a democracy than engaging with fans.

[fanhackers]

Illegitimate Media, Part II

In my last post, I shouted out Abigail De Kosnik’s dissertation, Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture. De Kosnik’s goal for this project was “to place African Americans and women at the beginning of the history of popular digital culture, to ensure that they are credited with the invention and popularization of the earliest forms of digital remix culture.” She also wants to explain “why their genres of remix have been subjected to so much censorship and restraint, from outside and in.”  Notably, De Kosnik spends considerable time examining censorship from the inside–that is, she looks at the ways in which female media fans have not just fought off censorship from outside, but negotiated their attempts to censor each other.  She notes the early adoption of the convention of warnings–which were meant to warn readers away: 

Note, in Examples 2 and 3, the word “WARNING” in capital letters leading off the posts, and the series of repetitive, emphatic statements making clear the fact that the stories contain sexual content, and the defensive phrases that seem to anticipate a reader’s negative reaction to the sexual content: (in Example 1) “I really can’t take any complaints seriously if you fail to heed this warning”; (in Example 2) “if you don’t like that, too bad. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to”; (in Example 3) “If that bothers you, do NOT read this story...Don’t flame me if you’re silly enough to go ahead and read it after I warned you, and then get offended by it.” These prefaces put the onus of the responsibility for the reader’s enjoyment of the erotic fiction squarely on the reader: (in Example 1) “Caveat lector,” or “Reader beware.” In all three examples of headers, the writers do not advertise the appeal of the sexual fantasies they have taken the trouble to create; they do not promise the reader pleasure. They do just the opposite: they address the reader with the assumption that the reader will find these stories about sexual gratification unpleasing, and these headers constitute pre-emptive strikes in the expected blame game that will ensue from the reader’s discomfort and displeasure. These headers state, It will not be my, the writer’s, fault for writing what I should not have if you are made angry or uncomfortable by this sexually graphic story, instead it will be your, the reader’s, fault for reading what you should not have (148).

That said, De Kosnik also acknowledges that “every severe warning can also be read as an invitation,” as “sly and flirtatious come-ons, meant to intrigue and entice” the reader.  She thinks that the history of erotic fanfiction (and the warnings thereof) speaks very specifically to the feminist pornography wars of the 1980s - which might be useful to think about as we consider how our own use of tags and warnings speaks to our own historical moment. 

--Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[fanhackers]

Abigail De Kosnik’s  Illegitimate Media, Part I

You might know Abigail De Kosnik, Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), as the author of  Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT 2016), which is about a lot of things including the founding of the OTW and the Archive of Our Own.  But I’m also a fan of her Ph.D. dissertation. Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture, which I cite a lot and which make arguments that, as far as I know,  have never been made quite the same way anywhere else. 

In particular, De Kosnik (here writing as Abigail Derecho) made connections between the remix cultures of African-American men “who, in the mid-1980s, began using digital samplers to cobble together pieces (or “samples”) of existing recordings to form new sonic composition,” and white American women, “who, in the early 1990s, formed online communities on Usenet groups to share fan fiction (fanfic) – stories based on their favorite characters from television and film texts.” The dissertation examines a wide array of sampling/remix/transformative practices not just in fandom but in music and the visual arts. But I find the connections De Kosnik makes with hip–hop most interesting and provoking:

What is remix? The historical answer is: Remix is a genre of artistic appropriation that began in the boroughs of New York in the late 1970s. The identity of its inventor is undisputed. Every reliable source names DJ Kool Herc, who immigrated to the Bronx from Jamaica as a child, as the person who first spun two copies of the same record on side-by-side turntables in order to extend the “break,” or “breakbeat,” usually defined as an instrumental part of a dance song or pop song, the part where the rhythm dominates, what S. Craig Watkins calls “the get down part,”  and what Grandmaster Flash calls “the best part of a great record.” In order to lengthen the rhythmic “best part” of songs, the part that made partygoers “get down,” Kool Herc spun two identical records on turntables at the same time, first throwing the needle down at the beginning of the breakbeat on one record and lifting the needle when the breakbeat finished, then immediately throwing needle down at the start of the breakbeat on the second record, and at the end of that break, playing the break again on the first record. Alternating between the records, Herc could, in theory, extend the break forever. Many DJs soon took up Herc’s method of spinning records to isolate and extend the breaks, and also adopted Herc’s method of speaking rhymes over the breaks. Several DJs became famous for the techniques of spinning and “rapping” that they invented; Flash and Grand Wizzard Theodore are the most revered of these. (21)

There’s a connection between remixing music to lengthen “the best part” of songs, and vidder Sandy Herrold grinning and declaring that, “Vidding is the good parts version: it’s the three minutes I want to see set to really good music.” (See below, “What is Vidding?” [2008])  Fanfiction also gives us “the best parts” of canon - or the parts we really really wanted and didn’t get.  

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer