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.

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.

Fandom research methods

Madeline Ashby has started a blog that aims to round up details about research going on in fandom. Interested in seeing what sorts of questionnaires researchers are using? Wondering whether someone else already taken that great idea and started a project? Fandom Research wants to be the go-to place to answer these questions. It’s early days yet for the site, but the more people who contribute, the more useful the site will be.

Today I contributed a guest post entitled Fandom research methods that discusses, among other things, AOIR’s ethics guide, which is the de facto guide for people working on research in human subjects via the Internet in the social sciences. While writing it, I was reminded that the impetus of many guidelines is to prevent the subjects of study from harm, and to ensure that they understand exactly what will be done with the responses they provide.

IP and Gender convention remarks

I gave my talk at the IP and Gender convention, and luckily, Rebecca Tushnet blogged the entire thing, in real time, as it was happening. You can read her summaries of everybody’s remarks here:

Keynote
part 1
part 2 (includes my talk)
part 3

In addition, the IP/Gender Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property’s official Web site at American University College of Law is here. The panels and remarks were recorded and may be audiocast or webcast, so do please check the official site, because they will put up the content shortly.

I’ll put up a bare-bones outline of my paper in a bit, but Tushnet’s post certainly well summarizes what I talked about!

Female fan culture and intellectual property

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be presenting at the the Sixth Annual IP/Gender Conference, “Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property,” held in collaboration with American University’s Center for Social Media, at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, DC. The conference runs Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24. More information about the conference is available here.

My topic is “Intellectual Property, Transformation, and Academic Journals,” and I’ll be talking about how Transformative Works and Cultures deals with intellectual property in terms of the copyright the journal uses and the way the journal handles things like embedded videos, screenshots, and photographs. TWC bucks many established trends in the publishing industry, from our insistence on open access to our Web-only presentation, and I’ll be talking about why that is important and interesting—not only for access in the field of media studies, but also as a way to shake off the print-first mind-set so prevalent in the publishing industry.

Registration information is available here.

The evening of April 23 begins the conference, with a showing of multimedia works by conference attendees. On April 24, there will be a full day of presentations and discussions. Here is the listing of those presenting:

Ann Bartow, University of South Carolina | Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College | Casey Fiesler, Vanderbilt University | Melissa Tatum, University of Arizona | Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa |Tisha Turk, University of Minnesota | Ann Shalleck, Washington College of Law | Laura Murray, Queen’s University | Jordan Gilbertson, University of La Verne, College of Law| Karen Hellekson, Transformative Works and Cultures | Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law | Kristina Busse, University of South Alabama | Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley | Zahr Said Stauffer, University of Virginia School of Law

Book featured at RCCS!

The book I coedited with Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, was selected as a title for review at RCCS for the month of March. Check it out here. Kristina and I had the opportunity to respond to the reviewer’s comments, and our response is there as well.

Here is the blurb from the RCCS:

each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS)
publishes a set of book reviews and author responses:
http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp. books of the month for march 2008
include:

Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture
Editor: Michael D. Ayers
Publisher: Peter Lang, 2006
Review 1: Lori Landay
Review 2: Shintaro Miyazaki
Review 3: Marc W.D. Tyrrell
Editor Response: Michael D. Ayers

Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships
Authors: Monica Whitty, Adrian Carr
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
Review 1: Rhiannon Bury
Review 2: Michele Hammers

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays
Editors: Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse
Publisher: McFarland & Co., 2006
Review 1: Lan Xuan Le
Author Response: Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse

The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press, 2006
Review 1: Christy Dena
Author Response: Anne Friedberg

enjoy. there’s more where that came from.

—david silver

Red team/blue team

A conversation between me and Jason Mittell is up at Henry Jenkins’s blog here.

Please feel free to head over there and comment!

Review of Hellekson & Busse, Fan Fiction…

The SFRA Review, a publication geared to academics in the field of SF, has published in #279, Jan–Mar 2007, a review of the book I coedited with Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction And Fan Communities In The Age Of The Internet. The review, by Christine Mains, does a good job of describing the contents of the book and contextualizing the discussions.

Mains concludes, “[T]his anthology is a useful and thought-provoking addition to the library of any scholar interested not only in media studies or fandom studies, but also in the practice of storytelling as it is shaped by the episodic nature of sequels and television series, by the world-building concerns of science fiction, by ever-changing technological capabilities” (12).