Fans' attitudes toward AI-generated works

Irissa Cisternino, a PhD candidate of Stony Brook University, is writing their research on topics related to technology, art and fandom. You can participate by filling out a survey and additionally, signing up for an interview. The survey is expected to last until at least the end of April, those, who signed up for the interview, will be contacted later. You need to be at least 18 years old to participate in either, be able to understand and speak English and identify as a fan.

After the completion of the research, it will be accessible as the dissertation of the researcher. If you have further questions, you can contact Irina Cisternino at irissa.cisternino@stonybrook.edu or Lu-Ann Kozlowsky at lu-ann.kozlowski@stonybrook.edu.

Help a Researcher

Leigh Ingram, a student at the University of Ottawa, in Canada, is completing a Master of Information Studies. The proposed research for their thesis is on information seeking behaviours in the fanfiction community, with a specific focus on how AO3 users search through the archive and use the embedded search functions on the website.

This study has received ethics approval for an anonymous online survey, followed by a few interviews. The survey will remain open for approximately 6-8 weeks depending on the volume of response. Following completion of the research, the intention is to share the anonymous data collected and potentially submit an article to Transformative Works and Cultures for consideration, so any findings will be shared with OTW/AO3. 

Survey takers must be 18 or older to take part. If you would like to learn more about the study you can review its consent form, which contains the researcher's contact information.

Calling LGBTQIA+ self-insert fan fiction readers and writers!

A fourth year student at the School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) at Northwestern University is conducting a research project, “LGBTQIA+ Identity Exploration and Expression Through Self-Insert Fanfiction,” which will examine the experiences of queer and trans readers and writers with self-insert fanfiction. This research has received IRB approval and is being supported by Dr. Jolie C. Matthews, associate professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.  

If you are interested in taking part, interviewees for this project are being recruited via a screening survey  You must be 18 or older and reside in the U.S. in order to participate. Questions about the study can be directed to Yiyang Liu or to Dr. Jolie C. Matthews.

Vidding’s Grandchildren? Edits, corecore, and other video feels

Thinking about the descendants of vidding, since I was quoted in this recent article on fan edits, “Why Do Fan-Made Trailers Rule the Internet?” by Cat Zhang. The edits of the article, like the fanvids of old, are scenes from television shows and movies set to music.  But while these edits are typically much shorter and more feels-focused than vids, they seem to me clearly a descendant of the form. In my book, Vidding: A History (2018), I talk about the ways in which YouTube and the algorithms of the internet were already affecting the aesthetics of vids back in the 2010s (spoiler alert: they’ve became shorter & more intense) and we can clearly see this trend in the 2020s now that fans are firmly on short-form platforms like Insta and Tiktok.  The edits in Zhang’s article are all about the feels, and a sub-class of edits, corecore (as explained in this Mashable article by Chance Townsend, “Explaining corecore: How TikTok’s newest trend may be a genuine Gen-Z art form”) is often used to express chaotic or overwhelmed feels.  Townsend says that what makes corecore so interesting is that “one’s feelings that couldn't be expressed through words are instead presented through images. Whether that emotion is happiness, a fear of the future, or the excitement of falling in love, corecore edits, through the use of multimedia, speak to our common experience.”  The idea of expressing emotion by the artistic act of combining disparate clips with music–well, it sounds like vidding, but at the same time it seems a long way away, too. That said, a work like this hip-hop based edit of The Bear, made by an artist at the X/Twitter account “black boy cinematic universe,” seems to be doing the kind of reparative fannish media work vis a vis race that older vids did for gender and sexuality. Zhang quotes the artist as saying: “There’s an energy to the show where it’s being carried by the people of color. So in my edit, I want to make sure there’s a song that represents that.”  That’s a very similar (and familiar) vibe: that urge to make the thing that will Get. It. Right.

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

I interviewed the organizers of the Media Fandom Oral History Project, and they shared about the project and what makes it important! The project collects oral histories (interviews) from fans about their fannish experiences. Oral histories help fans define for ourselves what it means to a fan, and they help preserve our histories for future generations. 

The project needs volunteers! Email oralhistoryfandom (at) gmail (dot) com if you want to get involved. 

The full interview can be found under the cut. 

-Lianne, Fanhackers volunteer

The whole world through queer-coloured glasses

Sometimes reading new scholarship coincides perfectly with the discussion I read here, on the blog. You have read discussion about fan perspectives on queer representation and on the fanfic lens and another take on the latter (or in other words, how to be gay).

Frederik Dhaenens writes research about gay representation on television. Their work dicusses both queer stories and queer readings which is what brought these previous posts to my mind. In queer readings, the audience was examined.

However, these texts only briefly touched on queer readings that were of not explicitly queer stories.

Audiences are adept at reading into the text but there are also more and more queer stories. However, an analysis of queer reading practices could look at these interpretations less as separate ones as they can co-exist. After all, many of us might have experienced reading everyone else around the canonically queer couple as also queer, haven’t we?

Szabo Dorottya

The Classics of Fan Studies: Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet

Today, I’m going to talk about a book that I always recommend to people who want to discover fan studies: Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet which is a collection of essays around fandoms edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. One of them about fanfiction as theatrical performance was even written by our very own Francesca Coppa! 

Each essay in this book can help us understand more about the inner workings of fan communities at a time when LiveJournal was at the height of its popularity and people gathered to talk about Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the early seasons of Supernatural. As someone who has always been interested in the reasons why fans turn to specific pairings, I particularly enjoy Elizabeth Woledge’s Intimatopia. It deals with the importance of homosocial relationships (social bonds between same-sex people) as a basis for slash stories. Using the example of Kirk/Spock, she explains that fans tend to focus on pairings that come from “a media source that already emphasizes homosocial bonds through the depiction of the loyalty between two men who live and work in a more or less homosocial community” (97).

If you’re interested in fan studies in general, I also recommend reading the introduction which gives a great overview of fandom at the time as well as the evolution of the discipline with a description of what came before and how the direction it was taking at the time. Busse and Hellekson also make some great points about the advantages of studying fandom when you are a fan yourself. 

Have you come across this book before? If so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments!

Honoring Our Foresmutters: Joanna Russ

Inspired to post today by the recent New York Times article on Joanna Russ, “Joanna Russ Showed Us the Future: Female, Queer but Far From Perfect,” which promotes an exciting new collection of her work by the Library of America.  Joanna Russ was a fan and a fanfiction writer well as, arguably, the literal founder of the field of fan studies. While Russ has been referenced or namechecked many times in the Fanhackers blog over the years (here and here, for example), I don’t think we’ve ever specifically shouted out her field-founding 1985 essay “Pornography By Women For Women, With Love.”  (Is there an important fan studies essay before this one? Perhaps Ien Ang’s 1985 work on Dallas fans? Janice Radway’s 1984 Reading the Romance? Lamb and Veith? Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winstons’s 1975 landmark Star Trek Lives? Maybe that one. But Russ is pretty much the first to document and defend modern slash fandom as we know it (which is one of the reasons the NYT article links to the Archive of Our Own.)   

Russ says a lot of things in this essay about Star Trek slash, what it is and how it works, and how slash serves as a sexual fantasy for women. (She also says some pretty fascinating things about not just female rape fantasy, but also about male rape fantasy: there’s a lot of sympathy here for men’s sexual fantasy and empathy for the way men are thwarted under patriarchy as well.)  But I think my favorite thing in the essay is the way Russ is willing to own her feels:

She ends the essay preparing to go back to the story she is writing!

That “Yum,” in print, in 1985, is everything! 

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

How do fans engage with the source material when there’s already canonical queer representation?

Rachel Marks looks at the fandoms for the DC Comics TV shows (like Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), which have been including queer characters since 2014 when the characters Sara Lance and Nyssa al Ghul shared a kiss in Arrow. Read the whole article for free, which is in the newest issue of the open access journal, Transformative Works and Cultures: “Fan perspectives of queer representation in DC's Legends of Tomorrow on Tumblr and AO3.”

Marks finds:

-Lianne, Fanhackers volunteer

The friends we made along the way

Discussing who the characters are and what canon is, is one of fandom’s most familiar activities.

In the prevalence of this activity, we might see, not an interest in any final answer, but how the discussion itself legitimizes the existence of a canon.

At the recent Fan Studies Network North America Conference, Clark talked about negotiating a character’s key attributes even after (or even more so) as the canon material comes to an end.

Clark, John. “Pokémon, I’m Glad I Got to Meet You!: Reckoning with the End of Ash Ketchum’s Journey in the Pokémon Fandom.” In Re: Fandom – Fan Studies Network North America Conference, 2023.

Silberstein-Bamford, at the same place, discusses the strategies fans use to manage the different attributes of the same character.

Silberstein-Bamford, Fabienne. “Refine, Revise, Rethink: The Fluidity of Character in Fanfiction.” In Re: Fandom – Fan Studies Network North America Conference , 2023. 

In these discussions, we can see that the act of negotiating these character’s identity, fans, at the same time, construct said identity: if there can be a discussion about who this character is, they certainly are and their identity can be fixed – if for the length of a fic. Then again for another one. Then again.

We have had time for the FSNNA conference experiences to settle. There were certainly some riveting talks and novel ways of presentations (including playable games) and we could watch it all in your company. This was possible because we just launched Fanhackers’ discord server. Such a novel experience for us! Let us figure the way forward together.

How To Be Gay, by David M. Halperin

While there are obvious fan studies classics, there are other books that don’t always fall into the “fan studies” canon that I have found incredibly useful for my own thinking.  I cited one of them, Carol Dyhouse’s  Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017), a few posts ago; another is David Halperin’s How To Be Gay (2012)

The Classics of Fan studies: Matt Hills - Fan Culture

The classic of fan studies I want to introduce today is a theoretical overview of the discipline from 2002. Indeed, in Fan Culture, Matt Hills explores the different theories of fan culture and the methodologies that had been used by scholars before him. 

I particularly like the first chapter in which Hills challenges the idea that there is a dichotomy between passive consumers and resistant fans:

In this chapter, he demonstrates that fans are also consumers and that depicting them as a separate group ignores the complexities and multiplicities of fandom. 

While I found this book compelling, I would only recommend it to people who have read some fan studies works already as it might be a bit complex as a first introduction to the subject. However, if you are interested in fan studies theory and methodology, this is the book for you!

When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?

At the recent FSNNA conference (were you there? Did we meet? If you’ve been there, the panel recordings and the discussion space is still available for a week.), Katherine Crighton, Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo introduced an online game where you can create new fanworks for your blorbo for the newest fannish sensation: Blow the Man Down. The catch is, this fannish sensation is not a TV show. The story is reverse engineered through the fanworks created for it, but in a sense, it doesn’t exist. Your blorbo also doesn’t exist. My blorbo is real cool, though, their name is Bogdán.

When it comes to fannish creation, there are some key theories to reference. Participatory culture is one, we also talk about gift economy, affective labor; can they possibly explain why we are able to act fannishly when there isn’t even a canon to be fans of? Are we experiencing real feelings for a fake blorbo because we participated in their creation, committing to this silly man? Or is it because of the nature of the work, we used fannish practices to create them, which is inherently affective? Or is it, as the presentation already points out, due to the spear theory: we build our blorbo by piercing many blorbos through and that creates our type? I dare you; play the game and let us discuss our experiences. Or if you’ve ever gonched, what did you think of it?

Participating in research about the motivation of fanfiction authors

Want to take part in a study on motivations for writing fanfiction and help out a fan studies researcher? Gaille Alyssa Stanley from the University of Cyberjaya (UOC), Malaysia has received approval from their Ethics Review Board for their study and is looking for fans 18 years old and above who write and publish fanfiction online without receiving monetary profit.

The online questionnaire is 14 questions and estimated to take 1 hour. All information will remain private and confidential. The information will not be disclosed to anyone other than the researcher and supervisor. The data will be collected anonymously and no personal data (e.g., name and address) will be required, except for email address as a means of communication. The data of the study will be used solely for research purposes and will not be shared to any external parties.

You can find out more about the study and access contact information at the consent form link.