#anti antifandom

[sjbattleangel]

Double D facts book: "It's perfectly fine to dislike something and criticize it. Just know that anti-fandom/hatedom isn't real political activism."

[weaselbeaselpants]

Since I don't want to link it back to two scenarios so...um...immediate, I'll just say; the "Suffering just makes you hurt"-mantra is one I def subscribe to in day to day life, even in small, trivial' things like fandomwars.

I had a person get pissed at me once cuz I defended antishippers. They explained and showed me how they'd been harassed and abused by antis for no reason other than calling themselves a proshiper - no, NOT for actually liking anything with r@pe/cest/p3doshipping - just Reylo *in theory*. They got treated like a literal predator not for anything they actually did but for the title that genuine creeps have decided to use for their kink as this person did for their safe shit and they got blasted for it....and then this person proceeded to call me a cword and accused me of condoning their abuse by proxy of me saying " I don't think antis are inherently evil, actually".

I get it. When you put up with harassment from people touting their selfdeclared fandomom as some kind of badge of honor, of COURSE I understand turning your back on everyone who calls themselves that same thing! That's just, like, a survival instinct. You don't want to be reminded of your tormentor(s) because you really shouldn't have to be reminded of your tormentor(s) while you're browsing fandumb inbetween school or work. You want to keep your tormentors at bay so no triggering shit ppl are romanticizing or covert bigotry someone's hiding under the language of criticism to get in the way of your vibes when this is your fandom and your space to be creative and unwind and be you. I really get it.

The problem is, and the reason I DON'T put up with antianti or antiproshipper shit, that's labeling a whole lot of strangers inherently bad over not having the exact fandom takes and conflating that with your legitimate ethics of outing predators and bigots...THAT is what's shitty.

I know for a fact that not all the people who tag their shit #proship even fully agree on what proship means. I know they are not all predators or even don't care about predators being in their fandoms. Trust me, they care. Some of the #antiship folks I know are the most lax mf w it comes to content warnings, horror, kinks and nuance and also really hate call out posts and want to avoid them as much as they can. I know they are not all self-righteous prudes and bigots trying to get kink out of pride or some shit. THAT SAID- if I haven't already seen creepypredatorybs from proshippers or bigotedbully-tactics from antis, I can definitely believe those things exist in those spaces. But again, those behaviors exist whether or not a person uses these self-given labels. You shouldn't throw your hands in defeat anymore then your shouldn't declare yourself the sole liberator.

Blocked the proshipper-stan I was of talking about because I kind of don't like being called a cant and told I'm okay with death threats...just like I did the antishipper who was sending me death threats that same day =). I know I don't have to deal with that bs and I'm glad I took that advice from a mutual abt my own personal boundaries.

Call out shitty behavior all you want, but the absolutist-rhetoric is not healthy and, more importantly, not doing anything to help people being abused by fandomculture anymore than you were when you first got accosted for disliking a thing that made you upset/liking a thing that made someone else upset. You gotta share your fandom with everyone so long as they're not bigoted, abusive or predatory. And yeah, I kind of reserve all those notions for people I can tell ARE doing those things...so, y'know Lily Orchard.

[mistermistyyy]

This is 100% true, and you should do it, but you don't even need to install an ad blocker for this! Simply replacing "fandom" with "antifandom" in the URL will replace it with a version with a layout designed to be used like an encyclopedia and not a billboard of GPU-munching commercials with a tiny view into the encyclopedia

introducing fandomfixer: a uBlock Origin (and really any adblocker) filter list that fixes fandom by removing all suggested content, popups, annoyances, and more! basically just a wikipedia style layout without the infamous yellow sidebar. download here :3

[franki-lew-yo]

Mouthwashing and fandom discourse as a whole.

So I recently explored the tag for Mouthwashing after watching two no-commentary lets plays of the entire game. I'm seeing a lot of posts pointing out how annoying it is that this game has a fandom and that this fandom is doing fandom things and stanning/"uwu-ing" characters from this incredibly nuanced, raw and not-fandom friendly piece of art. To paraphrase someone I just saw "you don't want mouthwashing; you want Among Us ocs but darker". And

for a moment I wanna talk a bit about how I absolutely agree with this statement while also talk for a moment about how and why fandom and catharsis fan fics exist and shouldn't be shamed inherently. Or, I guess, not in theory.

The "come on! Stop trying to make everything shippable/cutsey/memey/have a happy AU and face unpleasant emotions someone's trying to tell you about!" is SUCH a vibe with me. I felt this way in the 9 fandom a lot as a kid and that was just 9. Mouthwashing is like 9 on bathsalts emotions and theme-wise. It's a game where you play as both the flawed but caring captain of a doomed ship who's life becomes a Johnny Got His Gun-nightmare, and also a deplorable, hateful piece of garbage who got himself and his friend in that nightmare situation to begin with. Both characters, moreso Jimmy but Curly too, are the causes of their own misery. They're complex dealing with one of the two committing SA and doing nothing really about it/dodging the responsibility and humanity needed to support the victim whom they've wronged.

I fully admit it's groan-inducing seeing people be shipped up Anya with anyone on the ship considering what happens to her. On a pure pr level I think it would be illegal even since romance between coworkers in a workplace is considered conflict of interest/harassment as it so often is. (NOT that what Jimmy did to Anya is 'romance'. I'm talking about the shipping of Anya with the other three guys. I know there's people out there who do ship Jimmy/Anya; you don't have to tell or show me I believe you and also I already hate it.) It's ALSO groan inducing to see people ship Curly and Jimmy considering all Curly does to him- and just the fact that this incredibly tragic, toxic one-way-gone array friendship is reduced to "toxic yaoi teehee". It's annoying AT BEST.

I get the hostility towards fandom-tastic stanning and fandom behavior in general...the issue is it's still hostility and I wish some of you guys got that. Like it or not (you don't have to like it) fandom culture is inevitable to some degree. You can and should complain about your hangups but that's all you can do besides avoiding tags and just not engaging with that side of the fandom at some point. Save your call-outs and rage for when you see active deplorable bs being committed that people are excusing for dumb fandom reasons, like lolicon, hatespeech or harassment. I'm sorry but you can not actively go after and try and take down the innocent people involved in your trigger that aren't directly hurting you by liking the thing that triggers you; ie. people who get all shipping and fandom-brained about Mouthwashing's characters which you find offensive to do at all.

This type of convo is the crux of most 'antifandom' v profandom discourse in general; for Antis I think there ought to be a difference between the people that set you off bcuz of fandom nonsense vs sociopathic 'got mine'-creepiness. There's a difference between someone who draws r34 v Shadbase. For profandom types you out to face the fact that yes- maybe NOT EVERYTHING is meant to be shippable/memed. Maybe try practicing that a bit. Yeah it's most harmless and makes you feel happy, but considering how people outside of your hyperfixation-of-a-hyperfixation is a thing. The thing about the "don't like, don't read" argument is it goes both ways. If you're truly a "good fan" like you say you are than you have to realize that people will not like your problematicisms. Learn to interact with characters and stories without the possibility of shipping sometimes- or at least understand that that's the crux of what makes a story like Mouthwashing engaging, even if you also partake in the fandumb and AUs on the side. You can call Curly your babygirl and ship him or make him happy all you want but PLEASE acoknowledge that the game doesn't woobify him or excuse what he did to Anya as well. You can make some kind of AU scenario where Jimmy gets out somehow and becomes/is a slightly better person for all I care...so long as you PLEASE remember that he is canonically a r@pist and awful. Also, even if I'm okay with your fan decisions, note that myself and others are still going to be critical and be upset that you wrote it at all because of what kind of character Jimmy is. 'Critical' =/= declaring something evil.

Fandom behaviors are not souly a destructive parasocial outcome of brainrot; they're also a natural reaction to what happens canonically and the emotions you have to experiencing a story. It's normal and rational to sympathize and love Curly and despise and hate Jimmy. You can love/like/enjoy a problematic-to-DEEPLY DISTURBED-character based on their complexity in canon. They are fiction. They are not real. The reason you are so invested with them is because of that complexity and yes because they are fiction they are your 'toy' and you can doll them up in any kind of speculative AU crap you make. That's fanfiction, baby. Make yourself a fixit fic if you really want

BUT-

remember: it stays as a fixit fic. DO NOT cross the streams, or insist that your active misreading of the text is the same as the text itself. EVER. You should care about your special interest's escapism as a means of self-care. What you shouldn't do is demand that EVERYONE ELSE LOVE your coping mechanism and that any complaints by people on their own terms on their own blogs is #badfaith or an inherent attack against you. It isn't. You'll know when it is an attack against you and that's when you, the profandom-type, need to be prepared and save your call-out posts and blocklist for.

To me that's the fragility to fandom debates and fandom as a whole. You can not/should not police or control an entire group of people and how they perceive or interact with media. That's not fair and it's definitely not sporting or decent of you in a community. You have to share your community -your fandom- with people who hate ur fav and people who love your least fav. Agreeing to disagree means not tagging your nOTP as their shipname or by tagging your shipname loud and clear. It means filtering out posts with those topics but enjoying and/or reblogging the fandom takes you do share with your fellow fandom-mite that obviously posts abt those topics.

When schmit REALLY goes down and some assface reviewer/fan/SOMETHING is being an assface or doing something amoral under the guise of fandom-ing, that's where you out to put your foot down. Callouts and complaints are for people who did an egregious thing and refuse to take responsibility(lol) for it. They're not for "soandso likes the thing that triggers me, kill them"/"so and so is hating on the thing I'm kinning because it triggers them, kill them". Be an adult.

Your DNI lists should consist of "lolicon defenders" not "proshippers", as those ARE NOT one in the same. Same goes the other way around. List off "bigots, purity culture bs", not "antis and critics". These positions ARE NOT interchangeable. If you make them interchangeable than you're making things a lot harder for yourself.

-sincerely, a message from autistic ADHD/OCD woman who likes horror and media analysis as much as she loves popcorn fanfic schlock.

We don't all have to be friends and buddybuds. I just hate us hurting each other over being different kind of fandom-folk rather than for when someone sincerely mucks up and does something bad. Can't we all stick to our guns and just boycott Harry Potter like god intended?

[just-antithings]

This isn't technically an anti thing, but it's an article about antis. https://www.vox.com/culture/23733213/fandom-purity-culture-what-is-proship-antiship-antifandom

An excellent read!

[archtroop]

Anon will implode.

I think this is one of the most validating asks I've received out of a whole bunch.

It only proves my point, and I am lucky/sensible and sane enough to NOT be in the PuritanAntiTooWoke to walk the walk crowd.

As anon here magnificently displays: I belong in a crowd that,

A. Has nothing to hide (apparently anon logic obligates performative Victorian standards, and a side blog for every other thing. Anon, do you repaint your house according to the guest?)

B. A crowd that has zero tolerance to fakehood and virtue signaling.

C. Also, that credibility part. Anon, not every house is HydePark. You come to my house, you play by my rules. *taps sign* here be PROBLEMATIQUE fandom stuff. Deal with it. A person who is truthful does not need a drop curtain. Case in point, me Arch, you - anon.

D. Anon, that's some really depressing cult mentality you present. You are in a cult.

C. Damn destihellers and the like really had lost their favorite chewtoy, so they had to unearth and drag from the boidem the most ancient one they could find: Them Jews.

The actual epitome of

בא מקלל יצא מברך

"Came in cursing, turned out blessing".

Why is it that every time I click on a blog spouting Zionist horseshit it’s either a pedophile, an incest fetishist or both? Do you people not even have the self awareness to not post shitty political takes on your jerk off blogs? It kills any credibility you may have had when the first thing someone sees in your bio is ‘wincest’.

My dear followers croud, any bingos this ask fills?

Let me know.

Anon - calm your tits and seek out some help. Or Bach flowers. I don't care.

[fare-thee-well]

Some people will say that they are above the pro vs anti debate and think it's all incredibly stupid and insignificant, which I would agree to partly, if this anti vs pro debate hasn't led to minority groups (in this case a trans asian person getting the cops called on them because of someone who was absolutely obsessed with driving them into a corner for drawing fictional characters experiencing gore and other nonconsensual situations) getting in danger, getting doxxed, having to live in fear because another person thinks that it is a normal and good thing to get someone whose opinions they disagree with killed.

Usually those who say they aren't involved will jump in on the first occasion they get to join team Death Threats Are Good To Eradicate Freaks. A post where I said both sides have merit is still going around, I don't really think that is right anymore. The take that fiction and dark or difficult themes in them should be taken with nuance and that harassment or book banning is NEVER the answer still stands. What I would like to add to that now is that even if you yourself don't harass anyone but don't mind sharing around posts in which darkfic creators are consistently made out to be freaks, not normal, morally corrupt is adding fuel to the issue as well. You're allowing harassment. You're placing these creators somewhere in the social hierarchy that is below others, and thus not deserving of respect.

The same goes for sharing blacklists around of 'problematic' people (who once in a post joking with their mutuals used an out of context screenshot of a hentai or ecchi manga in which characters were apparently teens, thus underage; some may know who I'm talking about), so that their friend group may hopefully cut them off, take their support away, make sure everyone leaves them so that they can no longer depend on anyone, isolate themselves, and like a true anti often wishes for them, that they'll end their life. Sure is an odd coincidence that the people they can hurt the most with it is trans folks who often have to make do with smaller personal circles and online communities, huh. You may not be aware as an uninvolved person that it is the end goal, but you're helping them work toward it.

The suffering of a fictional character will NEVER be more important to prevent than a real human being. The lack of empathy in anti circles is honestly terrifying. They use the exact same talking points far-right politicians do when talking about immigrants. As an academic who has done research both on nationalism in European countries and antifandom in the West, I can say as much with confidence. Define the 'other' as below yourself and problematic to society so that others may eventually only see them as trash as well, then easily normalize treating them as such.

[ninjakittenarmy]

Hi there!

Saw your discussion on anti-/pro-ship terminology on damnfandomproblem´s post and since you don´t sound malicious I figured I´d send you some recources. (spaces in links added)

Terms and their usage: www . tumblr . com /carduelis-carduelis/710166898329927680/terms-related-to-shipping-and-their-usage

An article on the origins of the pro-/anti-divide: www . vox . com /culture/23733213/fandom-purity-culture-what-is-proship-antiship-antifandom

A personal account: https :// note . com /orangiah/n/n437e262ce2ce

A recent poll about the proship-anti distribution on tumblr (Too few respondents to be representative, but enough to show a broad trend. This poll started in a YA fandom so anti are more likely to be overrepresented than underrepresented): www . tumblr . com /hermesmyplatonicbeloved/755918234603175936/what-is-your-stance-explanation-of-the-terms

But the tldr is: Proship is a matter of ideology meaning a person is anti-censorship. It has nothing to do with personal tastes.

Appreciated, I’ll have a look.

Still, I wasn’t saying it was about personal preferences, I was saying that there’s a difference between being opposed to taboo subject matter in general and being opposed to things like smut or pornography of said subject matter. There’s a big difference between a story that discusses sex crimes seriously and an erotica featuring child characters.

[weaselbeaselpants]

"I'm not proshipper by choice"//"I'm not anti by choice"

Yes you are.

You're #mad that people hate your enemiestolovers/toxic relationship AU shipping enough that they call you a literal pedophile so you've taken up the mantle of Proshipper by choice as a means of 'owning' those who hurt you and proving the antis wrong.

You're #mad that people are comparing you to Anita Brynt for being uncomfortable with romanticization of heavy topics, so you've taken up the mantle of Antishipper by choice as a means of 'owning' those who hurt you and 'catching predators and bigots' b4 they happen.

I don't get resigning yourself to the slang term of someone who hates you who's a bad faith meanspirtpoor sport abt their fandom takes anyway. It's not reclaiming anything. "Antifandom" and "Profandom" aren't demographics, they're just positions we've made up for ourselves. The sooner we let go our our pride the sooner we can maybe get that KirotheWolf asshole in jail where he belongs.

[pronouncingitwang]

[ID: a screenshot of the abstract of the paper "Get out of here you anti": Historizing the Operation of Structural Racism in Media Fandom by Rukmini Pande. It reads,

Pleasure(s) of people of marginalized genders and sexualities are central to media fandom scholarship, making it suitable to analyze as an identitopia. Recently, the figure of the fandom antifan or anti, an individual deemed hostile to fan pleasure, particularly around shipping practices and fanwork production, has gained prominence in fandom discussions. The anti is seen to interrupt media fandom's identitopia through policing and puritanism.

A troubling aspect of this formulation is the consistent identification of fans who are critical of fandom's negotiation of race/ism, as antis themselves. They are then accused of supporting censorship in the name of social justice. This is a disruption of antifandom models as these fans do not claim a negative stance themselves. This article theorizes this disruption via the fandom killjoy, drawing from in-depth fan interviews and examining related racist incidents in fandom spaces.

keywords: fandom studies, antifandom, critical race studies, media fandom, fandom racism

/end ID]

forgot to do this on here but rukmini pande, author of fire ass fan studies examination squee from the margins: fandom and race, has posted a new article!

the abstract:

I've got a pdf and made it available to read in my drive if anyone wants to read it! it's 24 pages if you count the sources and it's VERY good. I've been waiting for it my whole life. every bit of fan/fandom studies from people of color are as good as gold. better than!

[lookwhatilost]

i watched tlj this morning. are you guys ready to hear me spend another 3 hours bitching about star wars? tbh i'm not talking about the movie so much i am the shitstorm of discourse that surrounded it.

I think that over the course of the 2010s, especially after trump got into office, and liberals started finding political import in every entertainment consumer choice they made – I know conservatives did this too, but liberals definitely put more stock in sticking it to trump by watching a movie – what started with cult tv writers of getting very literate with fandom preferences, reading this online and then exploiting it and toying with it to provoke reactions and build hype. larger companies and bigger products into the 2000s learned how to do this. it's something hollywood has always done to varying degrees, but i mean in a specific way more recently where it's kind of gesturing at social issues in kind of a vague way. the way they really do this now is kind of outside the movie itself. you astroturf all this shit about how it's so feminist or so inclusive. in the movie it'll be in the most superficial way possible, but you have all these thinkpieces layered into it. all this with vanity fair, buzzfeed, gq, and it just goes on. and on. and on. you create an expectation in the audience to see it when it's not there.

you guys know what back-masking is, right? like, how people will say if you play "stairway to heaven" backwards, there's a satanic message. and, like, true. where else would the stairway go backwards? but you'll play the record backwards, it'll sound like gibberish, but if you read what's supposed to be there, your brain sees it. if your friend says "that cloud looks like a dragon", you'll see the dragon even if you wouldn't have before you were primed to see it. these articles work the same way. they prime you to see all of this shit in a movie that's not really there. they take a reflective shallow pool and trick you into thinking its deep, or that it has a specific content or character. they combine that with the same technique to provoke fandom and antifandom simultaneously. all of those guys who yelled at kelly-marie tran online, that flipped out about there being a black guy or woman in their star wars or what the fuck ever are all, whether or not they realize it, part of the marketing process. because those guys existing and every fucking media going way out of their way to take any awful thing they say or do and make everyone pay attention to it promotes the movie.

in real world context, these guys aren't important or that significant in number. but when you get a ton of other people mad at them, and therefore emotionally and quasi-politically invested in them, they'll be watching and supporting and hyping up your movie and more invested in it than they otherwise would be. fandom, anti fandom, different factions of a fandom, all of those people fighting and arguing with one another gets them more invested in it and it gets more social media impressions. it's like a process of conquering and colonizing your psyche.

[johnmurphysreddit]

If you honestly think they got hacked 48 hours after Lexa ran away with the show’s twitter feed and the only things taken were a few wedding pictures stans have wanted for a year... good luck with that reality.  I understand they don’t wear masks there either because the power of wishful thinking is the greatest force in that universe. 

[throwingawayathrowaways]

this isn't my fandom but this did cross my dash earlier. and i'm making a throwaway because i do not want to get involved in pro/anti discourse for what i hope are obvious reasons given the subject of this post.

i came back because i saw the rebuttal on twitter by chance. meaning that there are going to be other users who will never see this correction, never realize that these users are not actual predators, and these screenshots will have been saved and circulated by people uninvolved for years to come.

and i'm going to be blunt here: this is why antifandoms are bad.

you are essentially cultivating a space where all you do is rile each other up about how evil and awful other people are. you are setting yourself up to fly off the handle at any tiny bit of information that confirms your biases, as you showed here.

moreover:

The server they made the confessions in? (Aka the one I'm in?) That's an anti server. So Zex actually infiltrated our server, not the proshipper one like they claimed.

you have no idea who this person is, what they're capable of, what their pre-existing biases are. you have no idea if this account here was made just to "get dirt" on proshippers - why you're a-okay with people joining these spaces to spy on others is abso-fucking-lutely beyond me. i would ban anyone who gleefully confesses they barge into spaces that aren't for them to gather intel to harass others further down the line.

i'd also ban anyone who joins a server dedicated to hating other people doing absolutely nothing to them because it does inevitably lead to this.

moreover, why was your first response to make a callout post and not contact authorities? because they alleged a real child was involved here. a person was being accused of basically having fantasies about grooming their five year old cousin, a supposedly real human being they had access to, and the go-to was to report it to strangers on the internet? if they had been predators then there is a high, high, high chance that a callout post slamming into the internet would've given them time to cover their tracks and come up with a lie.

i am actually begging you to reconsider the spaces you're in and the behaviors they encourage, because this isn't a whoops! this is going to have ripples that are going to haunt these people. especially if you ended up just deleting the original post, because now screenshots are going to float around without context... forever.

this could have you up on criminal charges if the victims of this wanted to pursue them.

for your mental health and general well being? get out of anti spaces. go join spaces that are about things you love, not things you hate. you don't have to join "proshipper" spaces but jesus christ this is beyond the pale and should be a come to jesus moment, especially since people are saying this is not the first time you've done this.

The whole truth (and an apology)

Hey guys. It's me again.

Hoo boy, where do I even begin?

So, as you guys have noticed, the blog about Kurophiliac and puppyfan9000, I'd taken down.

And I'm going to cut to the chase.

Turns out the screenshots really were faked.

Let's start at the beginning, where we got that anonymous confession in the server I'd mentioned.

Basically someone (we'll get to them in a bit) confessed about the whole "proshipper server lusting after a real minor. They had screenshots and they wanted someone to make a callout because they were too scared to do so themselves.

Wanting to make myself useful, I immediately volunteered.

And so the person (named Zex) sent the screenshots.

And once I'd received those screenshots, I made that post asking people to report both Kurophiliac and puppyfan9000. I even included a cybertip report link.

That was a stupid thing for me to do. That was a very irresponsible and dangerous thing for me to do. And that is putting it mildly.

I didn’t think about questioning the information provided, I didn’t ask Zex why they didn’t want to post the callout themselves, I didn’t even think about contacting Kurophiliac and puppyfan9000 who were allegedly involved in this "incident."

I went straight to extreme measures to take action against two people I barely knew myself without investigating further.

I took things at face value. I truly wish I hadn't.

Because, as I've said at the beginning, the screenshots really were, in fact, faked.

See, Zex had some past beef with Plato (aka Kurophiliac) and made this whole story about them being a pedo in order to frame them and ruin their reputation.

When I'd made that post, they linked it and outright encouraged harassment of these two individuals. (Which is, honestly a really dick thing to do.)

And the thing about them "infiltrating a proshipper server?" That turned out to be a lie too. Because they were always a proshipper.

The server they made the confessions in? (Aka the one I'm in?) That's an anti server. So Zex actually infiltrated our server, not the proshipper one like they claimed.

So, Zex (or should I say froggyhorse) if you're reading this right now... well, I'm speechless. I mean, going as far as to deliberately frame someone else for something so serious? It doesn't even matter whether the person you're framing is a proshipper or not, if you're framing someone as a pedophile when they've committed no such atrocity? That's sickening no matter what your excuse is.

As for Kurophiliac and puppyfan9000, if you two are reading this right now, well, I'm truly sorry.

I'm sorry I jumped straight to conclusions based off someone else's words, without questioning that person's intentions.

I'm sorry I immediately assumed the worst of you guys without being the bigger person and handling this like a rational person would.

My intentions mean nothing because I ended up causing you both harm. Just because I was lied to doesn't mean I'm not completely blameless in this. I should've investigated the situation before taking action. I should've seen those rather obvious red flags in those edited screenshots as well as in Zex's behavior. I shouldn't have taken the word of some random fucker on the internet.

Whether or not you guys forgive me for this is completely up to you. I understand either way. We can go our own ways if you prefer. Either way, I hope you two are doing alright, after everything.

And that goes for the rest of you guys. Have a good day/night.

[transformativeworksandcultures]

CFP: Centering Blackness in Fan Studies **DEADLINE EXTENDED**

This special issue centers Blackness in fandom studies. Fandom studies has gestured toward race generally, and Blackness in particular, from its alleged white center while always keeping race at its margin. It has largely co-opted the language of race, difference, and diversity from the margins and recentered it around white geeks and white women. Indeed, fandom studies has done lots of things—except deal with its race problem. But as Toni Morrison (1975) asserts, that is the work of racism: it keeps those at the margins busy, trying to prove that they deserve a seat at the center table. In this way, those considered marginal expend energy trying to be granted access to the center while citing, reifying, and expanding the supposed universality of the center that fails to engage the margin because it is too particular. If, as the title of Audre Lorde’s famous 1984 essay reminds us, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,”  then it is time to willfully ignore white fandoms, just as Black fandoms have been willfully ignored.

For this special issue, we seek to privilege and celebrate Blackness, not as a comparative but as enough on its own. We want essays that build on the relatively small but groundbreaking scholarly work that centers Black fandoms, including work on young Black male (Brown 2000) and female (Whaley 2015) comic readers; Black gay sitcom fans (Martin 2021a); Black fan “defense squads” that protect fictional characters’ Blackness (Warner 2018); Black fan labor (Warner 2015); Black antifandom (Martin 2019b); Black fans’ enclaving practices (Florini 2019b); Black female music fans (Edgar and Toone 2019); and Black acafans (Wanzo 2015). It also engages and with and builds on our Black feminist foremothers, including bell hooks (1992), Jacqueline Bobo (1995), and Robin Means Coleman (1998), who showed us ways to think about how Black audiences engage with media. This corpus of work on Black audiences and fandoms provides a base for further theorization about the experiences and meanings of Black fandom. We encourage work that engages, nuances, and challenges this foundational work, leading to novel reconsiderations of how fan studies defines and understands Black fandoms.

We invite submissions that contribute to a conversation that centers Black audiences, fans, antifans, and global Blackness itself. We are not interested in comparative studies of Black fandom practices, because Blackness is enough. This issue seeks to center Blackness and (anti)fandom in all of its permutations. We hope the following suggested topics will inspire wide-ranging responses.

Black folks and “doing” fandom.

Black fans and deployment of (anti)fandom.

Black fan practices imbricated in a politics of representation.

Affective Black fandoms.

The politics of Black (anti)fandoms.

Interactions between Black fans and media producers.

Audience/fan response to Black-cast remakes and recasting non-Black-cast texts with Black actors.

Black fandoms of non-Black-cast media.

Blackness and enclaving.

Black music fandom.

Black sports fandom.

Black fandom and labor.

Black fandom and affect.

Black antifandom and hate.

Global Black fandoms.

Black fandom and contemporary or historical politics.

Mediated constructions of Blackness.

Black fandoms and celebrities/parasocial relationships.

Black queer fandom.

Disabled Black fandom.

Case studies of specific texts related to Black fandom.

Historical and archival accounts of Black fandom.

Submission Guidelines

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) is an international peer-reviewed online Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and promotes dialogue between academic and fan communities. TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms, such as multimedia, that embrace the technical possibilities of the internet and test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Submit final papers directly to Transformative Works and Cultures by January 1, 2023.  JULY 1, 2023

Articles: Peer review. Maximum 8,000 words.

Symposium: Editorial review. Maximum 4,000 words.

Please visit TWC's website (https://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines, or email the TWC Editor (editor@transformativeworks.org).

Contact—Contact guest editors Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Matt Griffin with any questions before or after the due date at BlackFandomTWC@gmail.com. 

Due date—July 1, 2023, for 2024 publication.

Works Cited

Bobo, Jacqueline. 1995. Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press.

Brown, Jeffrey A. 2001. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Click, Melissa A., and Sarah Smith-Frigerio. 2019. “One Tough Cookie: Exploring Black Women’s Responses to Empire’s Cookie Lyon.” Communication Culture and Critique 12 (2): 287–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz007.

Coleman, Robin R. Means. 1998. African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor. New York: Routledge.

Early, Gerald. 1988. “The Black Intellectual and the Sport of Prizefighting.” Kenyon Review 10 (3): 102–17.

Edgar, Amanda Nell, and Ashton Toone. 2019. “‘She Invited Other People to That Space’: Audience Habitus, Place, and Social Justice in Beyoncé’s Lemonade.” Feminist Media Studies 19 (1): 87–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1377276.

Everett, Anna. 2001. Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Florini, Sarah. 2019a. Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks. New York: NYU Press.

Florini, Sarah. 2019b. “Enclaving and Cultural Resonance in Black Game of Thrones Fandom.” In “Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color,” edited by Abigail De Kosnik and andré carrington, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 29. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1498.

hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.

Martin, Alfred L., Jr. 2021a. The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Martin, Alfred L., Jr. 2021b. “Blackbusting Hollywood: Racialized Media Reception, Failure, and The Wiz as Black Blockbuster.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60 (2): 56–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2021.0003.

Martin, Alfred L., Jr. 2019a. “Fandom while Black: Misty Copeland, Black Panther, Tyler Perry, and the Contours of US Black Fandoms.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (6): 737–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367877919854155.

Martin, Alfred L., Jr. 2019b. “Why All the Hate? Four Black Women’s Anti-fandom and Tyler Perry.” In Anti-fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, edited by Melissa A. Click, 166–83. New York: NYU Press.

Morrison, Toni. 1975. “A Humanist View, Part 2.” Presented at Black Studies Center public dialogue, Portland State University, May 30, 1975. Transcription available at: https://www.mackenzian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Transcript_PortlandState_TMorrison.pdf.

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Shankman, Arnold. 1978. “Black Pride and Protest: The Amos 'n' Andy Crusade.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (2): 236–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1979.1202_236.x.

Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. 2005. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tracy, James F. 2001. “Revisiting a Polysemic Text: The African American Press's Reception to Gone with the Wind.” Mass Communication and Society 4 (4): 419–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0404_6.

Wanzo, Rebecca. 2015. “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0699.

Warner, Kristen. 2018. “(Black Female) Fans Strike Back: The Emergence of the Iris West Defense Squad.” In Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 253–61. New York: Routledge.

Warner, Kristen J. 2015. “ABC’s Scandal and Black Women’s Fandom.” In Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, edited by Elana Levine. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. 2015. Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

[theeternalghost]

Abstract��The online-based group known as antis, which originated around 2016 in the United States, exhibit morality-based, cult-like behavior and perpetuate hate speech and censorship in online spaces. Anti ideology has encouraged harmful, obsessive, and dangerous behaviors among its members, specifically minors and young adults. An analysis of the antifandom movement through political, sociological, and behavioral lenses reveals its damaging effects on women, people of color, minors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

[rainystudios]

My article is live!

With the advent of social media it appears fewer and fewer of Gen Z are being properly educated on internet safety. This is having a very real and dangerous effect on how they are interacting with media and adults online, largely in social spaces focusing on media (film, television, games, literature). Already there have been tangible consequences manifesting in suicide baiting, hostility, harassment and self-harming behaviors. The online-based ideological group known as antis, which originated around 2016 in the United States, exhibit morality-based, cult-like behavior and perpetuate hate speech and censorship in online fan spaces. Anti ideology has encouraged harmful, obsessive, and dangerous behaviors among its members, specifically minors and young adults. I explore this antifandom movement through political, sociological, and behavioral lenses to reveal its damaging effects on women, people of color, minors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.Word limits required me to greatly focus the conversation but there are definitely more pieces I will be publishing on this topic in the future