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Posted by fanhackers-mods

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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”

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Posted by fanhackers-mods

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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).

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