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

Posted by fanhackers-mods

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In the coming weeks, I’m going to do a bit of a tour around acafandom’s research outlets and platforms - by which I mean journals, presses, book series, archives: places where you might find work you’re interested in (or submit work you’re creating yourself!)

Today’s post will be about journals: these are typically peer-reviewed (the better the journal, the more peer-reviewed and the blinder the peer review).  Fan studies now has field-specific journals, but there are journals in other fields that have always been particularly friendly to fan studies work. (If you know of a journal that I should spotlight, please comment!) 

Transformative Works and Cultures - https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc

I can’t help but start, maternally, with the OTW’s own flagship journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.  This Diamond Open Access journal has been publishing consistently and on time since it was founded in 2007. (If you’re not an academic, you don’t know how rare that is! Academic time is glacial and things often come out really late - not TWC!)  

“TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived, as well as articles about the fan community. We invite papers in all areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, film, TV, anime, fan art, comic books, cosplay, fan community, music, video games, celebrities and machinima, and encourage a variety of critical approaches, including feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, audience theory, reader-response theory, literary criticism, film studies, and posthumanism. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship; hyperlinked articles; or other forms that test the limits of academic writing.”

Sample work:
Kennedy, Kimberly. 2024. “‘It’s Not Your Tumblr’: Commentary-Style Tagging Practices in Fandom Communities.” In “Fandom and Platforms,” edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2475.

Journal of Fandom Studies - https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-fandom-studies

The Journal of Fandom Studies is subscription-based, so access is best gotten through a library that subscribes to it. (Or - hot insider tip - if you need an article, typically if you write to the scholar/author they will share a copy with you. Scholars live to be cited! :D) 

“The Journal of Fandom Studies seeks to offer scholars a dedicated, peer-reviewed publication that promotes current scholarship into the fields of fan and audience studies across a variety of media. We focus on the critical exploration, within a wide range of disciplines and fan cultures, of issues surrounding production and consumption of popular media (including film, music, television, sports and gaming).”

Sample work:
Oh, Chuyun. 2015. Queering spectatorship in K-pop: The androgynous male dancing body and western female fandom.Journal of Fandom Studies,  Volume 3, Issue 1, Mar 2015, p. 59 - 78. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs.3.1.59_1

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies - https://www.cmstudies.org/page/jcms and  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms

The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies - previously called Cinema Journal - has long been friendly to fan studies scholarship. Many sections are open access, including the “In Focus” section, and the journal is typically available as part of the Project Muse database in libraries.

“JCMS’s basic mission is to foster engaged debate and rigorous thinking among humanities scholars of film, television, digital media, and other audiovisual technologies. We are committed to the aesthetic, political, and cultural interpretation of these media and their production, circulation, and reception. To that end, JCMS is dedicated to intellectual diversity of all kinds.”

Sample work:
Anselmo, Diana W.  2022. “Picture Pain: Anti-Heteronormative Female Fandom in Early Hollywood,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Volume 62, Issue 1, pp. 7-35. doi: 10.1353/cj.2022.0061

M/C Journal - https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal

M/C Journal was founded (as “M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture”) in 1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the meeting of media and culture. M/C Journal is a fully blind-, peer-reviewed academic journal, open to submissions from anyone.

Sample work:
Svegaard, S. F. K., & Vilkins, S. (2025). “Fandom and Politics.”M/C Journal, 28(3). Retrieved from https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/3190

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Posted by aninfiniteweirdo

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In previous posts, I have talked about data fandom and fan labour as something inherently linked to commercialization. In a paper I read, though, I discovered a case where data fandom was used as a tool – both to achieve certain goals on social media directly and to transform the participants’ fannish identity.

When the Dallas police launched the app iWatch Dallas for people to report law-breaking demonstrators, K-pop fans flooded the Dallas police official Twitter account with random K-pop videos—and many of these videos were fan cams. The app was disabled due to “technical issues” within a day, possibly because of such negative reactions on social media (Alexander 2020). Later, many K-pop fans spammed racist, white supremacist Twitter hashtags, such as #WhiteLivesMatter, with fan cams, eventually leading to these tags’ trending under the “K-pop” category on Twitter (Aswad 2020).

Zhang, Muxin. 2024. “Fandom Image Making and the Fan Gaze in Transnational K-pop Fan Cam Culture.” In “Fandom and Platforms,” edited by Maria K. Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Lesley Willard, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 42. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2463.

Fans in general are certainly very aware of discourse about them and their activities – that is the entire premise of this blog. It is more of a question of whether a transformative approach is accessible, not if we are aware that alternatives might be needed.

However, Zhang also shows that this use of fancams was not universal among stans. The difference is made between North American fans and South Korean fans and this difference is attributed to the identification with an idol’s success.

This identification might be very well grounded in the way the industry operates.

(…) fan leaders are portrayed as individual opinion leaders or fan clubs (formal or informal) who set the agenda and organize the collective action of daily fan activities, while they also function as intermediaries maintaining a close communication with the idol’s media companies and uniting individual fans.

Wu, Xueyin. 2021. “Fan Leaders’ Control on Xiao Zhan’s Chinese Fan Community.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 36. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2053.

Because of this coordination between the media company and fan leaders, the activities of fans can have an impact of the idol’s reputation and thus success. This responsibility is not shared by the North American fans.

In this way, while all the fans described can identify with their bias but it is an identification that is expressed in different ways which leaves them with different ways of expressing their fannish identity. Though, we are only looking at one case here, it already reveals some of the complexities and nuances we can encounter in fandom.

Szabó Dorottya

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