1. A new generation
[1.1] Transformative Works and Cultures was founded alongside the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007. The founding OTW board asked Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson to create the first peer-reviewed fan studies journal, and we established an editorial team and board and drafted the first call for papers. The first issue was released September 15, 2008, and we have published two or three issues every year since—general and special issues both. Our editorial and production teams have changed members, and we have updated the editorial board regularly, inviting younger scholars to join the conversation. But Kristina and Karen have remained editors in chief throughout it all, often all but willing the issue into existence. Especially early on, Kristina described herself as begging, bribing, and blackmailing authors and reviewers for content; Karen often had to step in when a volunteer disappeared, copyediting, tagging, and proofing articles until the day of publication. The journal has flourished thanks to all of the authors and reviewers who have created innovative and important academic content, as well as all the TWC volunteers who assure the journal's professional presentation.
[1.2] After all these years, we are immensely grateful to announce that Poe Johnson and Mel Stanfill will become the new editors in chief of Transformative Works and Cultures. Editing a journal is a huge responsibility; we are thrilled to hand the journal over to two outstanding scholars and dedicated administrators who will not only continue our work but also update and expand our initial vision. For example, in September 2020's editorial, we addressed the complicated intersection of race and fan studies—a topic both Poe and Mel have written about extensively, and to which they have dedicated much of their research. Likewise, both work at intersections where fan studies exist but may not be named as such, connecting other academic areas with subject matter and concerns treated in the field of fan studies. As such, they are perfectly situated to connect disparate fields and bring in new groups of scholars and methodologies, a move that will invigorate and complicate what at this point has become traditional fan studies.
[1.3] When Karen and Kristina met in 2004, fan studies was dominated by a particular approach and methodology best represented by Matt Hills's and Cornel Sandvoss's work of the early 2000s. TWC and OTW were part of a challenge to that specific fan narrative by focusing on gendered fan communities, centering transformative works, and writing as fans, fan work creators, and scholars on coequal terms. Both the fannish and the academic contexts have changed greatly, and the editors who spearhead TWC and its scholarship must reflect these changes. The journal must better reflect the international and interdisciplinary character of fan studies to incorporate fields of studies on the periphery, including subjects and methodologies not usually found in traditional fan studies. In so doing, fan studies can contribute to other fields just as those fields can contribute to fan studies.
[1.4] Poe and Mel will join Kristina and Karen as editors in chief for 2022, shadowing them to ease into the work. Editorial work completed by Kristina and Karen will be published in 2022; Poe and Mel's editorial work will hit print in 2023. We are all committed to safeguarding the uninterrupted, smooth continuation of the journal editorship.
2. Theory
[2.1] Anna Wilson opens the Theory section by focusing on the methodological choices and challenges that confront scholars in the "nascent field of premodern fan fiction studies." "Fan Fiction and Premodern Literature: Methods and Definitions" establishes three theoretical approaches, namely "poaching, transformation, and affect" (¶ 0.1), which Wilson uses to frame premodern fan works. By mirroring three distinct theories of fan works, Wilson shows how fan studies can be usefully used to analyze and interpret fan works outside of the more traditional fan studies subjects of TV and film sources. Mel Stanfill and Alexis Lothian's provocative essay "An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Racial Justice in Fan Fiction's Digital Infrastructure" revisits the recent discussions of racist texts and actions on the Archive of Our Own (AO3) and its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works. Drawing from studies on critical race, platforms, and anarchic activism, they challenge the OTW's liberal model and its critical detractors both, ultimately showcasing potential solutions but also their respective drawbacks.
[2.2] Racial discourses are also at the center of "Identity and Narrative Ownership in Black Nerd and Wicket: A Parody Musical." Scout Kristofer Storey looks at two "geek theatre" productions that transform existing texts and cast a much wider variety of cast members than traditional theatre productions. Highly self-aware, these metatheatrical performances challenge hegemonic discourses by placing marginalized fans and representations at center stage. Whereas Storey looks at content and form, Mehitabel Glenhaber focuses on the latter exclusively. "Tumblr's Xkit Guy, Social Media Modding, and Code as Resistance" looks at the Xkit browser extension, a tool that allows fans to more usefully navigate the social media site Tumblr. Glenhaber suggests that social media modding constitutes a form of fannish transformative work and subversive coding both. Finally, Rebecca Leigh Rowe, Tolonda Henderson, and Tianyu Wang use form (or, in their case, text-mining software) to add to our understanding of content. In "Text Mining, Hermione Granger, and Fan Fiction: What's in a Name?," they compare the occurrences of Hermione Granger's name and its textual contexts in Rowling's books and Harry Potter fan fiction. The results indicate the existence of fannish collective interpretations of the character of Hermione that differ substantially from their source texts.
[2.3] The final three theory essays showcase the diversities of fan studies in time and space. Ryo Koarai, in "Cinema Audience Immersion in Story Worlds through ouen-jouei," analyzes ouen-jouei, an interactive cinematic experience in which audiences cheer, interact, and cosplay, as they engage with and respond to the film. Koarai argues that the practice offers an embodied viewer experience that allows fans a "process of negotiation between their physical state as a spectator and their imagined self as a story world character" (¶ 0.1) Where Koarai discusses contemporary forms of Japanese fan engagement, Ellis Khachidze studies Japanese literary cultures. Khachidze, in "Women's Fan Writing and Transformative Works in Eleventh-Century Japan," uses fan studies to read The Tale of Genji (ca. 1021) within its specific historical reception context, suggesting that "the writing and reading practices of the period resemble those of modern transformative fan communities" (¶ 0.1). Erica Haugtvedt, in "Victorian Penny Press Plagiarisms as Transmedia Storytelling," likewise reads a historical literary landscape through contemporary understandings of fan fiction and transformative fan works. Khachidze and Haugtvedt both confront the question of how to study historical transformative communities with the use of fan studies methodologies while acknowledging the specificities of their historical contexts—the very concern Anna Wilson focuses on in this section's opening essay.
3. Praxis
[3.1] Praxis essays distinguish themselves from their theory counterparts by arguing for the importance of specific case studies; this section welcomes close readings of fan texts and communities. Liam Burke's "Harley Quinn and the Carnivalesque Transformation of Comic Book Fandom" uses ethnographic research of fans and industry members to argue that the character of Harley Quinn has been central to changing comic book production and reception. Katja Lee's case study of adult Lego fans showcases one possible solution to the acafannish dilemma on where and how to engage with a specific fan community. "Acafan Methodologies and Giving Back to the Fan Community" discusses the ethics of studying, participating in, and contributing to a community by sharing one's research and analysis. Like Lee's Lego fans, Ekaterina Kulinicheva studies material cultures and their adult collectors. "Sneakerheads as Fans and Sneaker Fandom as Participatory Culture," however, illustrates that knowledge of and stories surrounding shoes are central to the pleasure of collectors. In so doing, this essay complicates the simple binaries of creation and consumption, and of transformative and affirmative fandoms.
[3.2] Xavia Andromeda Publius studies the interaction between fans and showrunners surrounding the pairing of Big Brother's Frankie Grande and Zach Rance in "Zankie, Queerbaiting, and Performative Rhetorics of Bisexuality." Using the concept of queerbaiting, Publius discusses the complicated narrative of coming out within the context of a reality show and the complicated concepts of identity it predicates and requires. Emily Tarvin's "YouTube Fandom Names in Channel Communities and Branding" discusses fannish naming practices in YouTube channels. Functioning both as a tool to create and identify fan communities, the names nevertheless ultimately belong to the YouTube creators, who all too often assert their ownership. This tension between the needs and desires of channel creators and their fans illustrates an increased fandom commercialization that is "embedded in everyday social media practices" (¶ 1.3). Sneha Kumar likewise focuses on a very specific fan community in "Carmilla Fandom as a Lesbian Community of Feeling." By studying the emotional engagement felt by the web series' community, the essay studies the roles that race and sexualities play in the establishment of affective bonds. Thomas Baudinette's "Reflecting on Japan-Korea Relations through the Korean Wave: Fan Desires, Nationalist Fears, and Transcultural Fandom" offers a transnational approach as he reads the complicated reception of K-pop within the context of Japanese perception of Korean culture.
[3.3] One of the greatest shifts in recent fandom studies may be the greater visibility of Chinese media and fandoms within English-speaking fan and fan scholar spaces. This increased focus is apparent in the four essays published in this issue (and even more so in the forthcoming special issue on Chinese fandoms). Aiqing Wang situates fan identity and in-group behavior within the specific Chinese cultural context in "Face and Politeness in Fandom in China." In particular, Wang looks at linguistic and stylistic discursive strategies that often perform politeness in various ways depending on the audiences. While Wang mostly looks at fan interaction on Weibo, Feixue Mei's "Bullet Chats in China: Bilibili, Language, and Interaction" focuses on the Chinese social multimedia site Bilibili. The essay studies the way linguistic and visual languages move among different fandoms and sites, suggesting various directions of influence and imitation. The last essay in this section is "Fan Leaders' Control on Xiao Zhan's Chinese Fan Community," in which Xueyin Wu describes the fan communities surrounding a particular film and music star, as well as the way fannish actions yield political and social influences. Ultimately, Wu argues, the "fans' actions exhibit conformity rather than autonomy" (¶ 0.1), often guided and directed by fan leaders.
4. Symposium
[4.1] One approach to which Symposium essays lend themselves is a shortened form of a more complex argument that has yet to be published in full. Both Samantha Aburime's "The Cult Structure of the American Anti" and Francisca B. B. de Alvarenga's "Volunteerism in Fandom" offer such arguments. Both make provocative arguments that will, we hope, generate conversations and further work in areas that are important aspects of the current fandom landscape. In contrast, Otávio Daros's "Celebrity News and Cyberactivism in the #FreeBritney Fandom Movement" and Martine Mussies's "Not King Alfred's Brexit" provide tightly focused close readings of a particular fannish topic. Daros discusses the timely issue of Britney Spears's conservatorship as it is reflected among her fans; Mussies offers a close reading of two stories in The Last Kingdom (2015–) fandom that use Anglo-Saxon history to comment on contemporary British political issues surrounding Brexit.
[4.2] Like Daros's and Mussies's timely discussions connecting fan studies to current news cycles, Yudan Pang's "Censorship and Chinese Slash Fans" confronts last year's block of the AO3 for Chinese fans and multiple ways in which fans have dealt with this inability to use this popular fan fiction site. The final two Symposium essays illustrate the range of fandom studies even as both return to traditional fannish objects of affection. Eiken Bruhn's translation of her German article chronicles her personal journey in "My Coming Out as an A-ha Fan," in which she addresses questions of shame and desire, including her ultimate decision to embrace her fannish affect. Francine N. Sutton's "Pro-wrestling Fandom and Digital Archives of Wrestling Event Merchandise" likewise focuses on a well-documented fan object but shifts the inquiry to a more unusual engagement: the collective online sharing of photos relating to live events and merchandise. Like Lee's Lego builders and Kulinicheva's sneakerheads, Sutton's wrestling fans challenge easy categorization and offer new ways that connect diverse fannish objects, individuals, and communities.
5. Book reviews
[5.1] Mark Stewart reviews Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans by Mel Stanfill. Homing in on Stanfill's centralizing metaphor of the "domesticated fan," Stewart points out the "multiple modes of discourse analysis" (¶ 9) as well as the dual focus on fans and industry—a focus that challenges the singular focus on fan activism and agency in favor of an awareness of fan labor. That awareness, coupled with Stanfill's repeated focus on the discourses surrounding constructions of identities, in particular regarding race, offers a fresh approach that challenges and adds to existing scholarship, Stewart suggests.
[5.2] Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova's edited volume Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, reviewed by Ashley Hinck, "explores how popular culture intersects with civic action" (¶ 2). The wide variety of case studies provided showcases the volume's intermultidisciplinary nature, placing wide-ranging topics into conversation with each other. Hinck notes, "Ultimately, the book invites us to turn our attention to the intersection between fandom, popular culture, and civic engagement not as exceptions or outliers but as essential aspects of political culture" (¶ 12).
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] The following people worked on TWC No. 36 in an editorial capacity: Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Hanna Hacker and Bridget Kies (Symposium); and Katie Morrissey and Louisa Ellen Stein (Review).
[6.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 36 in a production capacity: Christine Mains and Claire Baker (production editors); Jennifer Duggan, Beth Friedman, Christine Mains, and Vickie West (copyeditors); Claire Baker, Christine Mains, Sarah New, and Rebecca Sentance (layout); and Claire Baker, Emily Cohen, Christine Mains, and Latina Vidolova (proofreaders).
[6.3] TWC thanks the board of the Organization for Transformative Works. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.
[6.4] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 36: Megan B. Abrahamson, AnnaKatherine Amacker, Suzanne R. Black, Troy Zhen Chen, Miyoko Conley, Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd, Catherine Duchastel de Montrouge, Olivia Dreisinger, Brianna Dym, Maureen England, Shannon K. Farley, Monica Flegel, Victoria Godwin, Derek Johnson, Melanie E. S. Kohnen, Carlen Lavigne, Linda Levitt, Feixue Mei, Allison McCracken, Michael McDermott, Christopher McGunnigle, Annemarie Navar-Gill, Rukmini Pande, Becky Pham, Adrienne E. Raw, Olivia Johnston Riley, Emily Roach, Lindsey Stirek, Xianwei Wu, Zhuo Zeng, and Xiqing Zheng.