1. Narrative, agents, processes, contexts
[1.1] In 2021, the audio entertainment platform Podimo released the podcast Ein Mensch verschwindet: Daniel Küblböck about German entertainer Lana Kaiser, who rose to sudden fame as a contestant in the first season of the talent show Deutschland sucht den Superstar in 2002. Trying to understand and reevaluate the impact and legacy of Kaiser twenty years after her first appearance on German television, the podcast covers Kaiser's life and career from the entertainer's troubled childhood to her disappearance from a cruise ship in 2018.
[1.2] Kaiser's fans had an important role in the production of the podcast. They appear as historical witnesses, recalling how their fandom for one of Germany's first reality-TV stars developed over the past twenty years and the intense public scrutiny and suspicion of the entertainer's public appearances, unapologetic bisexuality, and gender fluidity. On the podcast, fans perform historical analyses of German media culture at the beginning of the new millennium, when the growing popularity of reality TV and its stars triggered debates about culture in regards to creativity, empathy, privacy, and sexual and gender identity. But the podcast also heavily relies on materials collected and archived in the last two decades by the fan-run blog turned archive Danielwelt, providing information about the entertainer to the producers that would have been lost without the archival labor of fans. By giving the space to fans to voice their memories, the podcast is as much about the past and present of Kaiser's fan community, which continued supporting the entertainer after the media and public lost interest in her. Ein Mensch verschwindet thus exemplifies the intersection of history, fandom, and popular culture as it appears across various cultural entities—with fans as consumers of histories, subjects of histories, and producers of histories.
[1.3] This special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures explores the role of fans in the making of histories and examines the practices and media fans use to tell stories about the past. It contributes to the study of historical representations produced by fans and the complex dynamics and impact of these fan-made histories. Fan studies has a long tradition of studying fan productivity in relation to creative practices such as the writing of fan fiction (Bacon-Smith 1992; Coppa 2017), the production of fan vids (Stevens 2020; Turk and Johnson 2012), and the creation of fan art (Cherry 2016; Grant and Random Love 2019). In comparison, research on fans' role in shaping understandings of the past is comparatively small. Yet a look at the existing research already demonstrates the diversity of fans' engagement with historical tools, information, and media. Fans curate their own physical archives and museums (Baker 2015; Geraghty 2014; Swalwell, Ndalianis, and Stuckey 2017), manage online archives, digital collections, wikis, and databases (Booth 2011; De Kosnik 2012, 2016; Hills 2015; Lothian 2013), develop and share preservation methods in vlogs (Keidl 2018), chronicle the production and careers of their objects of fandom, write the histories of their communities as well as themselves (Coppa 2022; Hills 2014; Reagin and Rubenstein 2011), write historical fan fiction (De Kosnik 2017), produce oral histories, interview fellow fans and media professionals for podcasts, film and distribute documentaries, and remix historical footage (Keidl 2018; Stevens 2017; Webber and Stevens 2020; Waysdorf 2021). Moreover, fans appear as specialists in news media, and they may lend or donate parts of their collections to museums (Hoebink, Reijnders, and Waysdorf 2014; Keidl 2021b). While fan-made histories are often produced independently and are freely accessible to consumers, others commodify their work, selling it or producing it in collaboration with large institutions or production companies (Keidl, forthcoming). In sum, then, these examples demonstrate that fandom is also a participatory historical culture, in which fans consume, produce, disseminate, and manage knowledge about the past (Keidl 2021a; Webber and Stevens 2020).
[1.4] The concept of participatory historical culture has its origins in the field of public history (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998). The concept refers to the possibilities of the past to connect individuals to their community, although it "matters little whether 'the past' consists of a 200-year-old narrative, an account from a textbook, a display at a museum, or a tale recounted by a family member over Thanksgiving dinner" (Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, 190). As is the case with the idea of a participatory culture in fan and media studies (Jenkins 1992), participation in the realm of history making advocates for a more democratic approach to cultural production and the flattening of hierarchies and unequal power. However, neither participation in the realm of fandom nor the realm of history is neutral or produced without intention—and consequently, fan-made histories are also politically charged in their treatment of topics such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, and class. In addition to the question of whether and what kind of participation is possible, fan studies thus needs to investigate with what intention fans participate in history making and what value history has for fans. History is always put to use in response to specific needs, as scholars highlight in various contexts about the past being actively reimagined according to specific cultural needs in the present (Jordanova 2006; Parkinson Zamora 1997; Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998; Tuleja 1997). By focusing on the usefulness of the past, it is possible to not only investigate what is said in historical narratives but also emphasize the agents in the production of these narratives as well as the processes and contexts in which these histories are produced.
2. Five intersecting directions of history in fan practice
[2.1] With these four foci in mind—narrative, agents, processes, and contexts—we argue that fan studies' engagement with history as a fan practice should apply its methods and theories in five intersecting directions, as follows.
[2.2] First, fan studies needs to look closely at the impact fan histories have on fan communities themselves. Fan-made histories often cover aspects that have been excluded in broader debates, such as detailed histories of paratexts, merchandise, and spin-offs, or local aspects of fandom and reception (Geraghty 2014; Keidl 2018; Mukherjee 2014). But fans also use the history of their objects of fandom to tell their own life stories, merging autobiographical with historical writing and juxtaposing private and public perceptions of the past (Hills 2014). However, while these histories fill gaps, they also shape the structures of fan communities. Covering the complete political spectrum, fan-made histories can focus on marginalized groups or contribute to their marginalization, making history a central space for debates about who is welcomed as a fan and who is excluded. Moreover, the production of histories lifts certain fans to the role of gatekeepers, who gain fan cultural capital and influence by curating access to the production and cultural history of their object of fandom (Hills 2015; Kompare 2018). While most fan historians operate within fandom's gift economy (Turk 2014), others monetize their work, cooperating with the media industries for specific productions or being hired to write company histories and manage fan relations. Hence, history making is labor that generates different forms of value for different agents.
[2.3] Second, fan studies should investigate the materials and evidence fans collect. Neither fan archives nor the materials collected by them are transparent and unmediated records of the past. Archives are regimes of power that determine what is seen as a record of the past, how it is seen, and who is seen (Assmann 2011; Lothian 2013). Although fans mostly act as rogue and DIY archivists outside formal public and industry archives (Baker 2015; De Kosnik 2016), they share with them the regulation of access to collections and information on the past. Fans document, catalog, preserve, analyze, and make accessible to others tangible and ephemeral materials, thereby following a process of inclusion and exclusion. Fan archives might be comparatively excessive in terms of the objects and information they collect, but they are nevertheless always already limited and incomplete when it comes to the representation of the diversity of a fandom. Their collections indicate not only that fans care for their object of fandom but what and who fans care about in their fandom.
[2.4] Third, fan historians produce media that present themselves as truthful, accurate, and trustworthy. Fan studies needs to look at the formal choices made to communicate to the consumers of these histories that they are accurate. Consider the example of fan-made documentaries and fans' use of various images (scenes from films, historical images, interviews with time witnesses), editing (the length of certain scenes, juxtaposing past and present, speeding up or slowing down images), sounds (narrator or no narrator, on- and off-screen sound, music and scores, original compositions for the films), special effects (animations, image manipulations, charts, graphs), as well as the sources used (archival materials, private collections, other fan works) and participants (fellow fans, industry professionals, creative personnel). Equally, one can think about similar choices for other media such as print media (use of images or not, chapter length and organization, choice of cover), podcasts (opening jingle, archival audio records, interviews, narration), exhibitions (gallery architecture, design of display cases, labels, lighting, tours, guides), and vlogs (speaking into the camera, use of moving and still images, invitation of guests, titles, hashtags). In all of these instances, formal choices shape the meanings of the presented stories of the past.
[2.5] Fourth, the use—or the lack of use—of particular platforms for historical work is as relevant as the works themselves. Platforms have greatly affected cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization in ways that reconfigure the way cultural producers make and distribute their work, how this work is accessed and consumed, and what form of discussion is enabled (McCracken et al. 2020; Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy 2022). Fans use platforms to share and discuss their work with peers, seek funding for costly and time-intensive projects, establish themselves as a brand and sell their products, influence debates about their objects of fandom, and socialize and network with their communities. What content platforms make more accessible or not, what automated recommendation systems narrow instead of widen access to information, what content is suitable for monetization, what is even allowed to be shown, and what forms of discussions and networking are fostered or prohibited all contribute to certain norms that also affect the production and consumption of historical works by fans. As such, platforms also affect the quantity and temporality of fannish productivity, allowing fans to frequently upload new works. At the same time, the reliance on platforms leads to insecurities among fans around the preservation of both their objects of fandom and the works made around them. When everything can be deleted with ease, what gets kept? Fan labor thus also goes into this anxious work of preservation—of looking to shape the histories of the future.
[2.6] Fifth, fan-made histories are in dialogue with media produced by the heritage and media industries. Popular culture is nothing unusual in a museum today (Moore 1997), with individual exhibitions and complete institutions dedicated to film, television, comics, sports, music, toys, and celebrities. Equally, heritage industries collaborate with the media industries to stage large traveling exhibitions, connecting popular culture to themes of art, anthropology, psychology, science and nature, and history (Bartolomé Herrera and Keidl 2018; Hills 2003). Curated for fans but also often addressing fandom itself, these museums and exhibitions have become central contact points for fans. Yet even in this rapidly professionalizing and commoditizing environment of history (De Groot 2016), fans seek to curate their own exhibitions, showing their own collections and sharing their own points of view as well as establishing heritage institutions in places with little connection to the production of popular culture or even a tourism industry. Outside of the museum space, production companies develop a wide range of nonfiction media and products to commodify the histories of their intellectual property, such as making documentary films and series, releasing books and props turned merchandise, and sharing archival materials on social media. Here, nonfiction media becomes a way for the media industries to navigate their own history and image, focusing on those aspects most valuable for their trademarks—often with the involvement of fans themselves, who see forms of validation and prestige in having their work acknowledged by the industry, thus returning us to the first point. The essays in this issue all contribute to these debates from different angles.
3. Theory
[3.1] The four essays in the Theory section provide in-depth theoretical engagements with the power dynamics created by historical narratives, agents, processes, and contexts within media fandoms, cultures, and industries.
[3.2] Opening the section with "The Fan-Historian," E. Charlotte Stevens and Nick Webber bring together principles from historiography and fan studies to conceptualize fan-historians and their labor for and position within fan communities. Working toward an inclusive definition of the fan-historian, Stevens and Webber map the diverse historical work that fans perform as intermediaries in the construction of fans' and fandom's relationship with the past. Through their labor, the authors argue, fan-historians "play a crucial role in fan communities, articulating a relationship to the past that, in matching the approaches and concerns of fandom more generally, can underpin fan identities and help create a sense of home" (¶ 5.1).
[3.3] The next two essays in the section, however, demonstrate that fandom and fan history do not offer a home to all, being inhospitable to those pushed to the margins by fan archivists and historians. In the essay "I Also Eat the Straights: Male Heterosexual Fandoms Writing LGBTQ+ Media History in Japan," Edmond Ernest dit Alban explores the transformative works of Inmu fandom, heterosexual Japanese fans of gay pornography that preserve gay pornographic media online. However, although Inmu fans have built the most visible and developed online resources on popular LGBTQ+ media history in Japan, their decontextualized presentation of media history and historical LGBTQ+ lives reinforces stereotypes about homosexuality and contributes to the continued marginalization of queer individuals and communities. With no interest in queer politics and history, Inmu fandom is "reducing homosexuality to fiction, a literal joke, content and form-wise," using "underprivileged communities' representations to express their own feeling of marginalization" (¶ 3.5).
[3.4] In "Digital Archives, Fandom Histories, and the Reproduction of the Hegemony of Play," Taylore Nicole Woodhouse shows how both humans and technology shape fan archives run on social media platforms like YouTube. Although fans are producing the content of and metadata about videos, it is computer algorithms that shape how the videos are processed, organized, and presented on the platform. Woodhouse demonstrates with the example of a fan-made history video about League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) how fans build archives of game play that erase women, people of color, and other marginalized groups within gaming culture from their historical records. As a result, "the histories written by the fans who use this archive reflect not the wealth of ways of interacting with League of Legends or the diversity of its globalized fandom but the stories of a small slice of the community" (¶ 6.1).
[3.5] The section closes with Chris Comerford and Natalie Krikowa's "Archive Lensing of Fan Franchise Histories," which introduces the notion of archive lensing as a conceptual tool to think about wikis as important historical repositories of knowledge. Focusing on three archives created, curated, and maintained by fans of popular media franchises, Comerford and Krikowa identify three distinct roles of archives for fandom: the archive as chronicle, providing new information on an ongoing franchise; the archive as guide, providing new and old fans orientation to franchise content; and the archive as catalyst, encouraging fans to return to a dormant franchise. In all cases, the authors conclude, "the fan-made archive's historical value is both contemporaneous and contemporary, as it represents collaborative expressions of fannish communities of practice while also capturing impressions of them historically" (¶ 5.3).
4. Praxis
[4.1] The six essays in the Praxis section of this special issue focus on specific examples of fan historical practice, ranging across the five directions we have outlined above.
[4.2] Lauren Chalk's "Representing Reggaeton through Fans' Online Community Archives" looks at two fan-led archiving projects, the Hasta 'Bajo project and the Reggaeton Con La Gata platform, and how the archives and the fan-scholars behind their creation situate themselves. Chalk demonstrates how these archives work to not only preserve the histories of reggaeton music but also act as a form of cultural justice—of challenging traditional views of what is worthy of cultural preservation in Puerto Rico.
[4.3] Katriina Heljakka's "Fans, Play Knowledge, and Playful History Management" investigates how adult toy fans, through their playful practices and documentation, contribute to a historical understanding of their toys. Demonstrated through three case studies, Heljakka shows how play connects with preservation, documentation, and knowledge transfer, and how toy fans curate their own histories of these objects.
[4.4] "Reimagining Queer Female Histories through Fandom" by Ellie Jane Turner-Kilburn explores how queer female fans of the 2015 movie Carol reimagine queer history through playing off the movie. Turner-Kilburn works with a concept termed "erotohistoriography" to show how the pleasurable practices of fans—memes, fan fiction, and fan merchandise—both draw on and alter the past shown in the film to make connections with queer communities both past and present.
[4.5] Kimberly Kennedy presents the first of two essays on the practice of fan binding—that is, fans turning fan fiction into physical books. In "Fan Binding as a Method of Preserving Fan Fiction," Kennedy looks at fan binding as a practice of preservation, using interviews with fan binders to situate it within physicalizing practices and suggest implications for the broader preservation of fan work.
[4.6] The second essay on the topic, Shira Belén Buchsbaum's "Binding Fan Fiction and Reexamining Book Production Models," looks at fan binding through the lens of Darnton's (1982) communication circuit, showing how fan binding complicates traditional models of publishing and book production. In its links to gift practices and crafting, fan binding is shown as a particularly fannish method of preservation.
[4.7] Finally, in "Furry Fandom, Aesthetics, and the Potential in New Objects of Fannish Interest," Kameron Dunn presents a history of furry fandom as both a parallel and contrast to fandoms of single texts, a necessary expansion of what we can consider fandom. By drawing on the fandom's own historical works and documentation, its role as a long-term home for marginalized identities through creative and transformative work is shown.
5. Symposium
[5.1] The Symposium section approaches fandom histories through a variety of methodological, theoretical, and personal reflections and interventions on fans' engagement with the past.
[5.2] In "Femslash Fandom and the Cultivation of White Queer Genealogies," Emily Coccia discusses "too close reading" as a fan-inflected scholarly methodology. "Too close reading" as method, Coccia argues with the example of fan activity around Emily Dickinson and Anne Lister, enables readers "to notice the quieter forms of queer intimacy" (¶ 2.2) and to decenter structurally white histories by recognizing and making space for more inclusive and expansive understandings of queer pasts.
[5.3] Qiuyan Guo analyzes "Historical Poaching within Celebrity Fandom Practices." Focusing on the fandom for Chinese musical actors Ayanga and Yunlong, Guo demonstrates how historical poaching affords fans to enhance, validate, and reinforce their fandom for and knowledge of celebrities, making history a space for fans to reimagine and speculate about the past and establish connections to the present.
[5.4] Analyzing first-person recordings of themed attractions that fans usually share on YouTube in "Time for the Theme Park Ride-Through Video," Kyle Meikle investigates theme park ride-through videos as an archive, a performance, and a promotion. Drawing from performance studies scholar Diana Taylor's 2003 work on The Archive and the Repertoire, Meikle argues that these videos point to several different moments in time: the past, present, and future experience of a ride or attraction.
[5.5] "Fandom.com and Fan-Made Histories" emphasizes the importance of wiki-based websites for archiving specialist knowledge. Andre Magpantay foregrounds the different agents managing the wikis, the necessary labor to run and maintain them, and their importance for fan communities. As Magpantay argues, these sites "provide a safe, well-structured, and organized way to provide quality information while also encouraging social interaction among community members" (¶ 4.4).
[5.6] Also concerned with the role of fans as archivists for their communities, Tosha R. Taylor offers a personal reflection on her online fan archive on the DC Comics character Talia al Ghul in "Historicizing the Fan Archive of Talia al Ghul." The site was once known for providing "encyclopedic knowledge of a character," but Taylor shares how the discontinuation of the archive and the transition "to a nondescript character who also likes a particular character" came with a "feeling of loss" (¶ 2.8).
[5.7] "What Is an Anti?"—a roundtable with Alexis Lothian, stitch, Anne Jamison, Sneha Kumar, and Mel Stanfill—explores the use of the term "anti," as well as the terms "anti-anti" and "proshipper" as opposite sides of the phenomenon, in past and contemporary debates in fandom and fan studies.
6. FanLIS 2021
[6.1] This special issue also plays host to a collection of papers arising from the FanLIS 2021 Symposium. This symposium, and the resulting works here, aimed to explore the interrelations between fan practice and the field of library and information science (LIS), looking at how fans organize, manage, and use information and what these fan practices can teach the LIS field. These essays, while part of their own separately edited section, nevertheless touch on some of the same issues from the rest of the special issue—archive, preservation, and use—that are at the heart of participatory historical practices.
[6.2] It is introduced by Ludi Price and Lyn Robinson in "Building Bridges: Papers from the FanLIS 2021 Symposium" and followed by four papers and one multiauthored "scholarly brainstorm." In these papers, Paul Thomas looks at disputes in fan-made wikis in "How Adventure Time Fans Understand the 'True' Producer: A Close Analysis of Two Encyclopedic Fan Texts," J. Nicole Miller investigates reading and search strategies in "Information-Seeking Behaviors of Young Adult Readers of Fiction and Fan Fiction," Argyrios Emmanouloudis considers the archiving of ongoing fannish events in "Twitch (Still) Plays Pokémon: When Spectators Become Archivists," and Eleonora Benecchi, Colin Porlezza, and Laura Pranteddu explore the practices of fan studies itself in "Filling the Gap: An Exploration into the Theories and Methods Used in Fan Studies." In the scholarly brainstorm, entitled "What If Academic Publishing Worked Like Fan Publishing? Imagining the Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own," Nele Noppe, Ludi Price, Kimberley Chiu, J. Nicole Miller, Erika Ningxin Wang, Serena M. Vaswani, Sarah Kate Merry, D. E. Pollock, Suzanne R. Black, Rhiannon Hartwell, Naomi Jacobs, Paul Anthony Thomas, Argyrios Emmanouloudis, Erica Hellman, and Amy Spitz reimagine scholarly publishing through fan publishing, considering what the model exemplified by the Archive of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org/) can offer the field.
7. Book reviews
[7.1] The five book reviews in this issue reflect the richness of new publications across fandom research. Elyse Graham's The Republic of Games: Textual Culture between Old Books and New Media is reviewed by Suzanne R. Black, Brit Kelley's Loving Fanfiction: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms is reviewed by Judith May Fathallah, John Francis reviews Kathryn Hemmann's Manga Cultures and the Female Gaze, Kristine Michelle Santos reviews Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan by Patrick W. Galbraith, and Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture by Judith May Fathallah is reviewed by Ross Hagen.
8. Acknowledgments
[8.1] The following people worked on TWC No. 37 in an editorial capacity: Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Hanna Hacker and Bridget Kies (Symposium); and Katie Morrissey and Louisa Ellen Stein (Review).
[8.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 37 in a production capacity: Christine Mains (production editor, copyeditor, layout, proofreader); Jenny Duggan, Jillian Kovach, A. Smith, and Vickie West (copyeditors); Claire P. Baker, Sarah New, Rebecca Sentance, and Latina Vidolova (layout); and Emily Cohen, Rachel P. Kreiter, Cheng Shon, and Latina Vidolova (proofreaders).
[8.3] 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.
[8.4] 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. 37: Shira Belén Buchsbaum, Jen Gunnels, Edmond W. Hoff, Kimberly Kennedy, Nicole Lammerich, Lies Lanckman, Paul Long, Molly Rozum, Aaron Trammell, Ursula Whitcher, and yerf yerfyerf.