Fan Culture book cover
Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. 2012. Identity, ethics, and fan privacy. In Fan culture, edited by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, 38–56. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
October 8, 2012
May 1, 2012
Creating a fandom via YouTube
I just got my copy of the book my Verbotene Liebe essay appears in! Check out the pretty cover.
My article is in part 2, “Constructing Identity in an Online, Cross-cultural World.” Here’s the full citation info.
Hellekson, Karen. 2012. Creating a fandom via YouTube: Verbotene Liebe and fansubbing. In New media literacies and participatory popular culture across borders, edited by Bronwyn T. Williams and Amy A. Zenger, 180–92. New York: Routledge.
Alert readers will remember that I wrote a blog post about this topic ages ago, in 2009: Verbotene Liebe, soap operas, fansubbing, and YouTube.
Alas, although I submitted images to go with my essay, in the end they could not be used. So hit the blog link if you want to see pictures and maybe watch a video or two.
A big thank-you to Bronwyn and Amy for being so great to work with! The book turned out beautifully and it’s an honor to be in it.
Naturally you can score this awesome book from Amazon.com.
May 11, 2011
MiT7 on the horizon
I leave tomorrow for the Media in Transition 7 conference, the theme of which is Unstable Platforms: The Promise and Peril of Transition. My paper is called Academic Journals Online, and in a move that will surprise no one, I will talk about (among other things) Transformative Works and Cultures, the online-only Open Access Gold fan studies journal I coedit with Kristina Busse.
I’ll be talking about the “promise and peril” of transition in terms of the humanities’ rocky move to online publication in terms of scholarly journals. This topic interests me because I am employed in the publishing industry, plus I’m an editor of a journal, so I have to deal with a lot of behind-the-scenes copyright and production stuff that has implications for presentation and dissemination.
My panel, Publishing in Transition, is on the very last day of the conference, Sunday, May 15, from 10:45a to 12:15p. The other people on the panel are Kathleen Fitzpatrick (who will be talking about books, as opposed to journals), Hanno Biber and Evelyn Breitenede (online corporate texts), and Kristin Anderson-Terpstra and Casey Brienza (manga distribution in the United States).
Here’s my abstract:
The transition of scholarly discourse online is proving a bumpy one. Although some radical new modes of content vetting and delivery are emerging and “digital humanities” has become a buzzword, scholarly work online in the humanities and social sciences is not accorded the same prestige compared to journals that use a print-only or dual print-online model, despite the obvious advantages of access and use of embedded (multi)media. Yet these fears also reveal sites of possible renegotiation of the academic model in a way that will help scholars and scholarly discourse. Publishing in the humanities and the social sciences needs to follow the lead of the sciences, which were early adopters of moving and organizing content online: physics pioneered the online preprint; ClinicalTrials.gov registers trials and provides instructions for investigators; and journals in many disciplines publish online-only supplemental materials, such as data sets and online videos. Further, Creative Commons copyright and open access models have much to offer. All these ideas may be usefully co-opted by the digital humanities.
A draft of the full paper is up on MiT7′s site. Ironically, one concern of mine was that putting up full text would render any text I might try to publish about this topic unpublishable (because it had already appeared), so I wrote informally and didn’t cite exhaustively, so that any rewrite will be substantially different and could be considered. Hmmm… sounds like an excellent topic of discussion for this conference!
April 20, 2011
American remakes of British television
It’s out! Carlen Lavigne and Heather Marcovitch edited American Remakes of British Television: Transformations and Mistranslations, and I just received my contributor copy. My essay is entitled “Memory and the 1996 American Remake of Doctor Who.” Other TV shows discussed in the volume include American Idol, Cracker, What Not to Wear, Queer as Folk, The Office, Life on Mars, and Steptoe and Son. The essays are divided into three sections: Methods and Mechanics, Personal and Political, and Text and Context. The editors’ introduction usefully contextualizes the volume and sources other books about remakes.
The book is published by Lexington Press (a Rowman & Littlefield imprint) and is available in hardcover and in an electronic version. You can order it right from Lexington or, of course, from Amazon. The complete table of contents is up at Lexington’s site.
March 15, 2011
Comic book slash
Journalist Matt “Darcey” Buttell, writing for the Web site So So Gay, interviewed me via e-mail for a story about slashing the characters in comic books: “Slash: Fan fiction’s sexiest sub-culture.” Admittedly I know nothing about comic book slash, other than that Wolverine is hot, but I like Buttell’s thesis: that until comics’ TPTB get it together and introduce more canon gay characters, well, the unofficial stuff written by fans will have to do.
Matt mentions an important point that TPTB everywhere would do well to consider, because it’s true of more than comics:
Ultimately, fiction in any form works because writers are more than just storytellers: they open up readers’ minds to entire new worlds, previously unimagined landscapes or situations, and unforgettable characters. This applies both to fan fiction and the source material on which fan fic is based. The concern is that comics’ audiences seem two steps ahead of the industry when it comes to open-mindedness and diversity.
June 13, 2010
Practicing Science Fiction released
I’m pleased to announce that Practicing Science Fiction has been published and is available for sale from McFarland (the publisher) and Amazon.com. This edited volume is divided into four sections: Teaching, Reading, Media (that’s my section), and Women. I also did the production for this volume; it’s cool to work as an author instead of with an author.
Book cover, Practicing Science Fiction, ed. Hellekson, Jacobsen, Sharp, and Yazsek (McFarland, 2010). You probably can’t see it, but the robot has a teeny SFRA logo on its left shoulder.
These essays grew out of the Science Fiction Research Association’s 2008 meeting in Lawrence, Kansas, where I ran the academic track. McFarland has granted permission for me to post the full text of the abstracts. I’ve also posted the page ranges of the articles, as a courtesy to people looking for bibliographic info to construct Works Cited pages.
It was a great experience working on this book! All the royalties are being donated to SFRA. Thanks to my coeditors, Craig Jacobsen, Patrick Sharp, and Lisa Yaszek; to all the contributors; and to the four referees who provided their expertise during peer review.
This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This post was originally written on June 13, 2010. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you copy this post, please also copy the image and host it yourself. If you read this document at a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.
February 13, 2010
Fandom Wank article out
I just got my comp copy of Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, edited by Heather Urbanski, which contains my essay “History, the Trace, and Fandom Wank.” My paper is about textual production as social and historical practice. I use a particular sample wank, “How NOT to date a celebrity,” as an exemplar to discuss notions of documentation, evidence, the trace, and community standards within the fan community.
Cover of Writing and the Digital Generation (McFarland, 2010)
Those nearest and dearest to me are of course aware of my obsession with Fandom Wank. It’s not that I visit the site a lot; it’s just that when I do, I somehow love it. A lot. And that makes me feel guilty, because FW can be really mean. I’m fascinated by the way FW is actively constructed by its posters, and I am intrigued by the modes of evidence and its analysis used the wankers.
The book includes both essays and “profiles” for each section, so theory and practice are both represented. My essay is in the first section, “React: Maintaining a Fan Community.” The other sections are “Re-Mix: Participating in Established Narratives,” “Re-Create: Creating Narratives within Established Frames,” and “Teaching in the Digital Generation.”
Fan studies scholars will want to see in particular, in addition to my essay about fan and community behavior, Susanna Coleman’s “Making Our Voices Heard: Young Adult Females Writing Participatory Fan Fiction” and Kim Middleton’s “Alternate Universes on Video: Ficvid and the Future of Narrative.”* There are also essays about rhetoric, video games, Heroes, soap operas, fantasy football, and Sequential Tart.
The book came out in January and is available through Amazon.com as well as directly through McFarland.
Endnote
* Ficvid is Middleton’s term for cut-together clips from a primary source that tell a new story; she focuses on Buffy AUs. A famous crossover example that you may have already seen, although one Middleton does not mention, is Jonathan McIntosh’s fabulous “Buffy vs Edward (Twilight Remixed).”
This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. If you duplicate the post, please also copy the picture and host it yourself. This post was originally written on February 13, 2010. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.
September 27, 2009
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.
September 15, 2009
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.
August 25, 2009
Personas profile
Here is my Personas profile. It was quite a bit of fun watching it scan for information on me (“Karen Hellekson is…,” and keywords would flash by). I’m surprised about how little of it is about…er…copyediting, which I do for a living. I’m pleased to be considered an educator, and I certainly do a lot of service work. I’m employed in the publishing industry, and I used to write book reviews for Publishers Weekly, so the “books” thing makes sense. But why is “sports” listed so high? Must be aerobics!
Hellekson Personas profile. [View full size]
The thing that strikes me about this exercise is how the computer perceives my presenting myself on the Internet. I think of myself as primarily a copyeditor who does academic stuff on the side, but I don’t tend to write about my copyediting for privacy concerns. Likewise, I don’t blog about the work I do for the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures, but I spend a huge amount of time on it.
In interesting post yesterday on “Being Yourself Online (of usernames and avatars),” Brian Croxall talks about presenting himself online and controlling the message. Like Croxall, I have organized my online presence to a single username. But my connection with the fan world means that I post under my fan name also, although I have done very little of that since I started working on TWC because I do not have time; I now serve fandom not by creating but by administrating. Yet seeing my Personas result without the fan component means that an important aspect of me is absent.
I think it’s a good idea to create an online identity under your RL name that you can control, but I would also argue that having a separate identity may be an important part of the performance of self.
This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 25, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.
