Fandom and Feminism section of Cinema Journal

I just received my contributor’s copy of Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009). In it is an In Focus section edited by my Transformative Works and Cultures coeditor, Kristina Busse, about fandom and feminism, and I’ve contributed an essay about fan gift culture. Many of the other contributors are people I work with at TWC.

The In Focus section is available for download as PDF here. The contents are as follows:

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production, edited by Kristina Busse

• Introduction, by Kristina Busse
• “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness,” by Francesca Coppa
• “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” by Karen Hellekson
• “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” by Abigail De Kosnik
• “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergece,” by Julie Levin Russo
• “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” by Alexis Lothian

Thumbnail of Cinema Journal cover

The cover image illustrates our In Focus: it’s a screenshot from Lim’s 2007 fanvid, “Us,” which you may view at MediaCommons (curated by Kristina): “Us” – a multivid by Lim. This metavid has rightfully gotten a lot of attention, and it still brings tears to my eyes: there is so much of me (the fan) and what I believe in there. The artist was profiled at NPR at “Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses.” This vid is a wonderful example of how fandom is sometimes all about us and our practices (the “den of thieves” of the song), and not (really) (always) about the source material.

TWC No. 3 released

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 3 has been released right on schedule.

The table of contents is here, and OTW’s announcement about it is here.

This issue has some great topics: filk and wrock, quilting, Lost, Law & Order: SVU, a couple items on the LOTR fan film The Hunt for Gollum, an essay about the troubling aspects of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, an essay about gift culture (a particular interest of mine)—well, just go read the issue yourself, because it’s all this and more.

We’d love it if you used the software interface to write comments to the authors. Remember, the issue is fully open access, so feel free to copy, paste, transform…it’s all good.