Online Fandom Research Articles

Hacking Xena: Technological innovation and queer influence in the production of mainstream television

ABSTRACT This article is an historical analysis of a period in which early online fandom allowed for significant queer influence on mainstream televisual narratives. I argue that the technological affordances of the internet enabled Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) groups to communicate their desire for queer(ed) content directly to production, leading to queer “hacks” of mainstream entertainment. The introduction of new technologies leads to increased familiarity among previously distanced groups (Marvin, 1988. When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press). This is well illustrated in the case of Xena: Warrior Princess, a syndicated TV series that aired from 1995–2001. Xena's audience-industry co-production initiated the official reimagining of the possibilities for sexuality and gender in the series. I explore this unique era through analysis of online fan discussions and public statements by production as well as in-depth interviews with fans and two key informants: a 20-year member of the Xena fandom and a high-ranking Xena executive. I interrogate potentials and limits of the Xena hack and demonstrate that the now ubiquitous, commercialized nature of online fandom detracts from queer influences on heteronormative content not specifically marketed as “gay.” This historical arc suggests the presumably empowered queer hack is vulnerable to the technological hegemony traditionally imposed on marginalized groups.

Watch the Birdie: The Star Economy, Social Media and the Celebrity Group Selfie

This work will explore some of the broader implications of celebrity group selfies, through the example of Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded group shot, taken during the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony, Joan Collins’ 2014 Prince’s Trust Award selfie, just days after, and Collins’ subsequent ‘view from the other side’ tweet; exploring notions of authenticity, performance, intimacy, self-promotion, public visibility, identification, imitation, vicarious consumption and audience participation. Engaging with existing work upon celebrity tweeters, Twitter and other online fandom, photographic theory, star studies and, in particular, Bourdieu’s theories surrounding cultural capital, taste formation, and cultural distinctions, this work not only explores some of the reasons behind the frequently negative judgements of celebrity group selfies, but also seeks to identify some of the very real social functions and more personal gratifications, both for celebrity and fan, that the celebrity group selfie, as a communication and a self-promotional tool, may actually satisfy. More specifically, it is this paper’s contention that selfies offer an ostensibly unmediated, accessible and virtually instantaneous means of articulating and disseminating a coherent, identifiable, aspirational (yet bizarrely, also, seemingly ‘ordinary’) and eminently marketable star image, via a popular and up-to-date medium. With celebrity group selfies this is also the case, but here the photographer subject presents an image of themselves to the world, in relation to a specific group of peers (who themselves also function as signifiers and commodities); perpetuating the notion of a pantheon of star ‘gods’ and the myth of a coherent celebrity community; reinforcing the divide between ‘famouses’ and ‘normals’ and participants and observers; prompting an exponential rise in fan/public interest as more stars enter the equation and allowing the celebrity participants within the image to either borrow some of the greater ‘worth’, ‘status’ or cultural capital of other, more eminent, celebrity subjects also pictured or alternatively, lend their superior cultural capital to less successful celebrities within the image. As such, this work seeks to move beyond a hasty dismissal of such images, their subjects, and their audiences and instead, hypothesise a coherent set of reasons why the most-photographed individuals on the planet (not just film stars, but heads of state and religious leaders) might feasibly choose to create, appear in and/or disseminate such images (or, indeed, decline to participate as did Prince Charles in Joan Collins’ group shot) and why the public may find these images of such interest.

Fashion and fandom on TV and social media: Claire Underwood’s power dressing

Abstract This article seeks to discuss the relation between TV series characters, fashion and fandom through social media. It focuses on a specific kind of TV series, quality dramas, and in particular Netflix’s House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–). This series is a model example of the way clothing is a key factor that elicits audience engagement: the fashion universe of the female protagonist, Claire Underwood, is clearly included in the story, contributing to the definition of both the environment and the character. The relevance of style, outfits, clothes and fashion accessories is underlined by several online fandom interactions: audiences talk daily about how particular characters dress or act, check and share information and images about outfits and brands and buy online the products seen on TV. Audience members build and negotiate their gender identity through a performative self-representation, using (buying and wearing) fashion-symbolic materials provided by TV. These practices, now enabled by the social TV phenomenon, allow audiences to engage with the contents in a sort of expanded TV experience, which is the focus of this article. In particular, the aim of the article is to explore the process of fashion appropriation and reworking enacted by the audience with respect to Claire Underwood’s power dressing and to provide evidence as to how TV shows can offer diverse fashion experiences by which individuals can be inspired in representing the self.

Writing with the Winchesters: Metatextual Wincest and the provisional practice of happy endings

Abstract Soon after its premiere in 2005, the American television show Supernatural spawned an online fandom dedicated to ‘slashing’ the show’s two protagonists, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester: that is, to writing stories in which the brothers are portrayed as lovers. Over time, the existence of these slash narratives – affectionately dubbed ‘Wincest’ by the show’s fans – has been incorporated into the series’ diagesis. Indeed, in the wake of the programme’s repeated forays into diegetic metatextuality, some Supernatural fan writers have re-incorporated Sam and Dean’s canonized awareness of slash fiction back into Wincest stories themselves - specifically, into the subgenre of metatextual Wincest, stories that recast Sam and Dean as conscious participants in Wincest fan culture. Using Della Pollock’s notion of performative writing as a guide, this essay will explore the distinctive types of encounters between reader, writer, and text that metatextual Wincest stories facilitate. Further, the application of this critical approach to three such narratives – nyoxcity’s ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, Road Rhythm’s ‘This is All Very Meta’, and Fanspired’s ‘Conversations with Head People’ – highlights fan writers’ perception of their own creative authority within the ongoing process of meaning-making that continues to spin around Supernatural. Ultimately, this essay will argue that what makes metatextual Wincest stories distinct is their suggestion that only by working in concert with their fans can Sam and Dean finally write their own version of a happy ending, something ‘the show [itself] eternally defers’ – even if the lasting power of the ever-after they create together remains, in the end, uncertain (Tosenberger 2008, 5.12).

“Xenasubtexttalk”

This article examines how some lesbian fans of the television adventure fantasy series Xena: Warrior Princess (X:WP) (1995–2001) became visible through the development of online fandom and the production of explicit lesbian Internet fan fiction. The self-identity of lesbian fans who are part of the “xenasubtextalk” (XSTT) fan group is explored and celebrated through social networks of lesbian fandom through the “Xenaverse.” Lesbian fans have written copious amounts of fan fiction online enabling a form of lesbian political discourse and activism as well as social and cultural discourses shared throughout the platform of the Internet. Many lesbian fans have been supported to create and write Xena lesbian fan fiction by engaging with various lesbian fan writers from the Xenaverse who offer their advice to develop lesbian fan fiction services for free to “newbie” writers. Their explicit lesbian fan fiction narratives are reproduced and distributed as lesbian stories about the two main characters Xena and Gabrielle from the original television series. I interviewed three women from “xenasubtextalk” who gain pleasure exploring their lesbian identities and fandom through the fan group.

K-pop, Indonesian fandom, and social media

Around the world, pop consumers are increasingly accessing popular products through social media. Online fan groups of Korean popular music (K-pop) in Asia have dynamically and transculturally circulated their product through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. In October 2010, Super Junior, a K-pop idol boy band, was ranked as the number one worldwide trending topic on Twitter—ranking even higher than a sensational news story about trapped Chilean miners. Regional fans in Indonesia in particular have been identified as the source of a spike in tweets on this topic. Such a phenomenon illustrates how social media–empowered online fandom enhances cultural flow and affects transcultural pop circulation dynamics. I examine these dynamics by means of the specific case study of K-pop fandom in Indonesia. By focusing on three specific aspects of new media circulation of K-pop in Indonesia—performing immediate transculturations, embodying K-pop, and building intimacies—I contextualize transnationally focused, newly emerging, and social media–deployed cultural circulation driven by online fan practices.

Silence in the library: Archives and the preservation of fannish history

Media fandom is an ephemeral culture, and online fandom even more so. A printed zine from the 1970s may last longer than a story published online in the last six months. For some, fandom is a private endeavor, and that very impermanence a desirable feature. But for those who seek to read and be read, to build on and be inspired by the collective history of fannish creativity, there is nothing so vital to authorial fandom's survival as the archive. In the following, I intend to give a brief overview of the main online interfaces fans have used to share their works and how these have affected authorial control, reader accessibility, and general permanence.

Experimenting with Fandom, Live Music, and the Internet: Applying Insights from Music Fan Culture to New Media Production

This article maps and theorizes online jazz fandom activities around live music, and then reports on applied experimental work that the authors undertook with jazz promoters and musicians to explore ways in which live music can be situated in the activities of online fandom. Three theoretical themes of online taste-maker-led fan communities, narratives of online fan experience, and modularization of content are explained and discussed. Two case studies, where the theoretical themes are applied to the practical needs of live events organizers, are then introduced, discussed and evaluated. The authors then draw conclusions about the extent to which an understanding of fan practices and the possibilities of online platforms can be combined to extend the experiences of live musical events into online experiences. They also consider the possible ways in which online media re-address a series of questions about narrative and narration, agency and subjectivity, expertise and accessibility.

Good Neighbours? Fan/producer relationships and the broadcasting field

Much work on media fandom has considered the relationships between fans and those responsible for creating the object of fandom, particularly the interactions between fans and producers of television shows. This paper considers fan/producer relationships within online fandom of the Australian soap opera Neighbours to examine how such interactions function within soap fandom. I suggest that the often fierce clashes between fans and creators of fan objects can be better understood through application of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory. Fields are always characterized by struggles over legitimacy and bids for dominance and this paper argues that fan/producer relationships can be better understood if we consider them as agents who occupy positions within the ‘broadcasting field’ and engage in often fierce clashes over their positions within the field and the ‘appropriate’ behaviours associated with them.

Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership

is delivered to you. Your television and your computer are going to become the same device within the foreseeable future.9 Official and unofficial authors were perhaps surprised to find themselves on the same side of the batde lines during the strike, allied as creative workers in the context of convergence. Participants in online fandom, who are uniquely equipped to realize the Web's status as a commercial platform, banded together to support television writers by picketing, educating, and fundraising. Mean while, fans too are wondering how they will be contracted and compensated in a me dia economy that increasingly attempts to harness and monetize their activities. It is the potential queerness of convergence itself?transgressing the accepted boundaries of media formations, which makes for strange bedfellows and hybrid offspring?that enables the increasing fertility of queer viewing, and these proclivities necessitate new negotiations and protocols on the part of the industry. Toaster Lover allegorically represents Video Maker's optimistic fantasy of a warm relationship between media producers and consumers: a romance between the monstrous automaton and the scrappy softy who find true love as war between their kind is waged around them. Vidders incarnate an alternative fantasy of kinship; collective, networked, and unsanc tioned, they reproduce without a patriarchal center. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives such as Video Maker, with their intrinsic compro mises and contradictions, can adequately channel fandom's procreative potential into one big happy capitalist family. *

"Oh my God, the Fanfiction!": Dumbledore's Outing and the Online Harry Potter Fandom

"Oh my God, the Fanfiction!" Dumbledore's Outing and the Online Harry Potter Fandom Catherine Tosenberger (bio) For anyone who wishes to observe the cultural impact of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, the online fandom is an excellent place to start. Readers who participate in the Potter fandom do not simply passively absorb the texts but actively respond to them.1 These responses to the Potter books include "wizard rock" (see Karin Westman's essay), experimental fiction, slushy romances, visual art, and densely academic analyses. Online Potter fandom is an invaluable repository of the creative and critical responses of the series' most dedicated and engaged readers. Jill P. May has critiqued the tendency of children's literature scholarship to invent an "imaginary" young reader and to base analysis upon a fantasy of what this imaginary reader will get out of a given text (82–83); though not made up exclusively of young people, online Potter fandom makes accessible the responses of the real, rather than the imaginary, audience. Fans' immersion in the texts and attention to detail often results in sharp, rigorous analysis; much fanwork is concerned with romance and sexuality, and fans' discussions of these issues with regard to the Potter books are especially thoughtful and nuanced. Among participatory fans, one contingent was unsurprised when Rowling, during an appearance at Carnegie Hall, announced that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay: readers and writers of "slash" fanfiction. Slash—fanfiction that concerns a romantic and/or sexual relationship between characters of the same gender—is one of the most popular forms of Potter fanfiction.2 Slash fans are always on the lookout for hints of homoeroticism in the source text that can be spun into a story, and the description of the relationship between Dumbledore and his boyhood friend-turned-enemy Gellert Grindelwald proved especially fruitful in this respect; fans began creating stories, art, and critical essays concerning their relationship immediately following the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—anticipating Rowling's announcement by three months. Immediately after her revelation, Rowling laughed, "Oh my god, the fanfiction" (Italie). Over the years, Rowling has proven to be not simply [End Page 200] aware, but actively supportive, of fanfiction; her confirmation of Dumbledore's sexuality lends support to Sarah Gwenllian Jones's articulation of slash not as a perverse "resistance" to a given text's presumed heteronormativity but rather "an actualization of latent textual elements" (82). Following Rowling's bombshell, journalists and fans debated the "canonicity" of Dumbledore's homosexuality. Journalist Jeffrey Weiss claimed, "If you didn't put it in the books, please don't tell us now" (Weiss), a view echoed by some fans. Further, Rebecca Traister, in Salon, argued, "[Rowling's] pronouncements are robbing us of the chance to let our imagination take over where she left off, one of the great treats of engaging with fictional narrative" (Traister). However, fans have always disregarded aspects of the books that are unequivocally canonical if they interfere with the stories fans want to create, so Rowling's extratextual pronouncements pose few impediments to fans' imagination. But the question of how much influence an author has, or should have, over the interpretation of her text is of obvious relevance to fandom, and fans were divided in their perceptions of Rowling's motives; some saw her as benignly supplying more information upon direct fan request, while others saw a more sinister desire to control the interpretation of her books. Rowling appears to believe that her announcement of Dumbledore's gayness is not, in fact, extratextual; during a press conference after her Carnegie Hall appearance, she indicated that she felt the nature of Dumbledore's feelings for Grindelwald was evident within the text: "It is in the book. He had—it's very clear in the book . . . I think a child will see a friendship and a sensitive adult may well understand that it was an infatuation" ("Web Exclusive"; Ahearn). As mentioned above, Rowling is well-informed about fandom; without straying into the realm of intentional fallacy, it is possible that Rowling's conviction that Dumbledore's homosexuality is "very clear in the book" may be connected to her awareness of...

Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, by Rhiannon Bury. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005. x+ 242 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN 0-8204-7118-6

Rhiannon Bury provides an engaging ethnography of two elite female online fandom spaces. Participants are members of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade Research Project (DDEBRP), arising from the ...

Computer games: text, narrative and play

* List of Illustrations * Acknowledgements *1. Studying computer games *2. Defining game genres *3. Games and narrative *4. Play and pleasure *5. Space, navigation and affect *6. Playing roles *7. Reworking the text: online fandom *8. Motivation and online gaming *9. Social play and learning *10. Agency in and around play *11. Film, adaptation and computer games *12. Games and Gender *13. Doing game analysis * Notes * Games Cited * References * Index

The Clothes Make the Fan: Fashion and Online Fandom when Buffy the Vampire Slayer Goes to eBay

The public's reception of eBay's auction of Buffy the Vampire Slayer wardrobe items marked an instructive collision of online fandom, television production/consumption and e-commerce. As opportunities for critique and fantasy production, the clothes crystallized tensions within the series and among fans: between ownership and authorship; a viable feminist politics and the sexualization of cast and characters; the perceived egalitarianism of online communities and eBay's explicit competitiveness.

Quality popular television: cult TV, the industry and fans

1. Introduction, Mark Jancovich and James Lyons Part One: Industries, Networks and Programming 2. Vertical Vision: Deregulation, Industrial Economy and Prime-Time Design Jennifer Holt 3. Must See TV: Programming Identity on NBC Thursdays, Nancy San Martin 4. The Changing Face of American Television Programmes on British Screens, Paul Rixon Part Two: 'Content is King': Formats, Shows and Events 5. Transnational Context to Long-Format Special-Event Television: Branding Networks, John McMurria 6. Must See Queer TV: History and Serial Form in Ellen, Anna McCarthy 7. 'You're not going to see that on TV': Star Trek: The Next Generation in Film and Television, Roberta E. Pearson and Maire Messenger-Davies 8. Brave New Buffy: Rethinking 'TV Violence', Lisa Parks Part Three: Commodity Audiences: Cults, Fans and Dedicated Audiences 9. Martial Law and the Changing Face of Martial Arts on US Television, Andrew Willis 10. Superman on the Set: The Market, Nostalgia, and Television Audiences, Ian Gordon 11. Web Wars: Resistance, Online Fandom and Studio Censorship, Sara Gwenllian-Jones Afterword 12. What is Television For?, Alan McKee