You're afraid to be corny, but I was born on the cob

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Today we’ll be kicking off a new, ongoing series - in between regularly scheduled posts by the Fanhackers team, we will offer guest posts by a number of prominent fan studies scholars. 

We are inviting them to tell us about a critical work, theorist, or piece of fan studies that is useful to them - not the best one, or even their favorite one, but the one they build with or build their work or thinking on: their “go-to” piece of criticism.  

We asked them for a quote and a bit of an explanation as to its importance.  We hope you enjoy hearing the results as much as we did! 

First up: Paul Booth.

Paul Booth is a professor of Media and Pop Culture at DePaul University, and a prolific fan studies scholar - his recent books include Entering the Multiverse (Routledge, 2025), Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury, 2023), Board Games as Media  (Bloomsbury, 2021); The Fan Studies Primer  (University of Iowa Press, 2021); Watching Doctor Who  (Bloomsbury, 2019); and the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley, 2018). Along with Rukmini Pande, his is the series editor of the Bloomsbury Fandom Primers.  His response is below:

“Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality.” (45)

From: Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (University of California Press, 1966)

I’ve taken the liberty of picking a quotation I don’t use much in my research (although it influences me more than almost any other!), but rather one I use in my teaching quarter after quarter after quarter. Burke’s discussion here about how technology both guides what we view and always what we don’t view (e.g., what stories ignore, what stakeholders want us to forget) has implications not just for media and technology, but also for fandom. Fans often focus on the the things left out - the “deflection of reality” Burke talks about. Fans create stories in the margins, outside the line of sight for narrative, media technology, and more. At the same time, fandom provides new reflections, new selections, and ultimately new deflections as well: creating and making in different contexts but still, and always leaving things out. Fan studies research (and media studies more generally) is important because it helps us identify those deflections; to recognize and to combat them.

- Paul Booth, Professor of Media and Pop Culture, DePaul University

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Posted by aninfiniteweirdo

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The Fandom Brand Guarantee

When a fan goes into a bookstore, they can point at many books where even just by looking at the cover, they can tell that the author or the work in particular came from fandom. It might be that while the names were changed to file off the serial numbers, the cover artist kept the visual resemblance of the leads. Or, as Malone shows when talking about manga creators, the author’s name is the giveaway.

Notably, when artists are contracted to the three major publishers, they tend overwhelmingly to be credited only under their real name; by contrast, artists who publish with smaller presses almost always make use of their online nicknames or usernames (…) This practice not only refers back to the original online presence of both author and work, as brokered by Animexx.de, but also maintains a sense of community among the artists. At the same time, however, it cannot be overlooked that the exposure of these artists’ cultural capital under their nicknames on the Website and in their published work serves well to create a kind of “branding” or name recognition that can easily be turned to the generation of economic capital as well, while also maintaining the artists’ “civilian identities” for other projects, since most of the manga artists described here clearly want to have artistic careers beyond a specialty in boys’ love or even in manga in general.

Malone, Paul M. 2010. “From BRAVO to Animexx.de to Export: Capitalizing on German Boys Love Fandom, Culturally, Socially and Economically.” In Boys Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 36. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Even with the serial numbers off, a work like that might still attract not only fans of that specific fic, but of that canon, but even moreso, participants in fandom. Because we also know of published works that were not inspired by a specific canon, we even know about works that started as original and the author at one point attempted or even did convert it to fanfic. For sure, we know that there is something more to be gained from fandom than just canon. It is also clear that a good publicist can help the author gain a lot from revealing the fandom origins.

Do we feel safer trusting these authors, knowing they won’t bait us? Do we expect them to write differently and are they? Is it a different genre or a different mode of producing?

Malone specifies that these creators kept their fannish signifiers only when publishing with the smaller presses, and says elsewhere:

(…) several newer and even smaller specialized publishers have now arisen to cater exclusively to the boys’ love market: both Fireangels Verlag and The Wild Side Verlag license and import material from abroad – chiefly the U.S., France and Italy- but they also publish home-grown German-language boys’ love manga. All of the German artists currently publishing with Fireangels and The Wild Side also have a presence on the Animexx.de Website, so that the initial chapters of both Martina “Chiron-san” Peters’ boys’ love science-fiction thriller, K-A-E 29th Secret and Makiko “Zombiesmile” Ponczeck’s sexually less explicit but more violent Lost and Found, for example, were once available on their respective personal dojinshi pages. (…) Peters and Ponczeck are art directors at the Fireangels and The WIld Side respectively.

Malone, Paul M. 2010. “From BRAVO to Animexx.de to Export: Capitalizing on German Boys Love Fandom, Culturally, Socially and Economically.” In Boys Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti, 34. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

There is a fic writer guarantee in a recognisable pseudonym. But is there a recognisable gatekeeper or recognisable production decisions that can provide the fandom guarantee?

Poster: Szabó Dorottya

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