Censorship and Chinese slash fans

After the Archive of Our Own (AO3), which housed many Chinese fan works, was blocked in China in February 2020, Chinese slash fans had to decide what to do. Uses and gratification theory helps explain why Chinese slashers chose quite different paths after AO3 was blocked, with three main tendencies observed: creating culture islands on foreign platforms, creating in a foreign language, and staying on domestic platforms but self-censoring to stay within the rules. Each option provides a different balance of affordances, depending on what trade-offs readers and writers are willing to make.

Cinema audience immersion in story worlds through "ouen-jouei"

In Japan, ouen-jouei (cheer screening) events permit novel forms of audience participation, with screened events allowing cheering, glowstick waving, and cosplaying. Fans immerse themselves in story worlds by physically performing at such ouen-jouei events. Ouen-jouei audience members become immersed in the film's story world through a process of negotiation between their physical state as a spectator and their imagined self as a story world character, as is demonstrated by ouen-jouei events associated with the 2016 Japanese animated film King of Prism. Theories associated with audience studies, media studies, and fan tourism are deployed to analyze this novel form of cinema audience immersion. It is impossible to physically integrate audience members and a film's story world, so fans' inner experiences become the primary concern.

"Carmilla" fandom as a lesbian community of feeling

The fandom of the contemporary lesbian web series, Carmilla (2014–16), is an affective community built on a set of inclusions and exclusions. Carmilla, a 121-episode web series shot in vlog format, follows the relationship between a human girl and a female vampire, and it has an active online lesbian fandom. Affective bonds are created between Carmilla fans through various kinds of online fan practices, and these flows of affect are influenced by the race and location of fans.

The cult structure of the American anti

The online-based group known as antis, which originated around 2016 in the United States, exhibit morality-based, cult-like behavior and perpetuate hate speech and censorship in online spaces. Anti ideology has encouraged harmful, obsessive, and dangerous behaviors among its members, specifically minors and young adults. An analysis of the antifandom movement through political, sociological, and behavioral lenses reveals its damaging effects on women, people of color, minors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Volunteerism in fandom

An examination of the topics of labors of love, the gift economy, and the digi-gratis economy related to volunteerism within fandom platforms highlights issues related to monetary compensation, enjoyment of labor, and relationships between fan labor and the job market.

Sneakerheads as fans and sneaker fandom as participatory culture

This paper considers sneakerheads, or sneaker collectors and enthusiasts, as fans. It explores both them and their participatory culture, developing a new approach to researching sneakerheads: I here conceptualize sneaker collecting as an object-inspired fandom to highlight the difference between sneaker fandom and other object-oriented fandoms. This paper demonstrates that sneaker collecting is about both collecting knowledge about the subject of sneakers and collecting sneakers themselves. The materiality of sneakers, the story behind a design, and the cultural history of sneakers attracts sneakerheads to sneakers. As such, I here explore the following characteristics of sneaker collecting: the importance of knowledge and its acquisition, the high value of the community's practices and activities, the high level of emotional involvement, fan art (sneaker art), and anticommercial ideologies and beliefs. The approach demonstrated in this paper could also be useful in research of other communities organized around collecting wearable goods, such as clothes or accessories, including football T-shirts, vintage denim, and bags.

"Popular culture and the civic imagination: Case studies of creative social change," edited by Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova

Review of Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova, editors, Popular culture and the civic imagination: Case studies of creative social change. New York: New York University Press, 2020; paperback, $32 (400p), ISBN 9781479869503; hardcover, $99 (400p), ISBN 9781479847204.

Identity and narrative ownership in "Black Nerd" and "Wicket: A Parody Musical"

While theatre and popular media alike tend to almost exclusively favor the white, heteronormative, male perspective, much of fandom culture has developed around geek fans' ability to read alternative, and often resistant, meanings into established texts, then transform them into performances that strive to correct the flaws and fill the gaps in the source text. Analysis of Dad's Garage Theatre Company's productions of Jon Carr's Black Nerd (2018) and Travis Sharp and Haddon Kime's Wicket: A Parody Musical (2017) as case studies reveals that geek theatre uses fandom techniques of resistant reading, rewriting, and performance to disrupt and restructure hegemonic narratives to foreground the experiences and perspectives of minorities whose stories frequently fall through the gaps of the established canon.

Reflecting on Japan-Korea relations through the Korean wave: Fan desires, nationalist fears, and transcultural fandom

The reception of K-pop in Japan must be contextualized within the postcolonial relationship between Japan and Korea. Studying fan discourse and discourse about fans reveals that the Korean Wave (that is, fandom around Korean popular culture) has produced various desires and fears among the Japanese public, suggesting that persistent Korea-phobia among conservatives stymies K-pop's soft-power potential. A longitudinal study of K-pop fans in Japan and an ethnographic investigation of Tokyo's Koreatown, Shin-Ōkubo, indicate that these fans' activities reflect the current state of Japan-Korea relations. Consuming K-pop instills attraction among fans, but this must be weighed against the potential dismissal of Korean Wave fandom by conservatives as being too feminized. This case study shows the usefulness of transcultural approaches to analyses of fans.

Not King Alfred’s Brexit

A close reading of two The Last Kingdom (2015–) fan fics hashtagged #NotMyBrexit, "One England" by BigHeartBigFart and "Under One Kingdom" by Honiejar (both 2019), shows that both authors use the (mediated character of) real-world King Alfred of Wessex (849–899) to comment on the Brexit transitional era. The authors mix contemporary references with historical associations to advocate for unity.