gosh what a great public service this DW is

I have petitioned the BISAC gods for a fan studies BISAC code. Will they bestow one upon us? Probably not! But if you want to submit your prayers to them as well, you can do so here.

BISAC codes are subject codes for books. The lists of codes are mysterious but without them, it is hard to find books in your subject area. Fan studies books are way too hard to find! This would fix that. Somewhat.

image description: screencap that says “Thank you for submitting your suggestions to the BISAC subject committee”

tumblr sucked yet its the only thing people like us could ever have posted on. tumblr was a deep sea geothermal vent and we are all pallid, desperate crabs snapping at the dark toxcic nutrients spweing from its hole, and bringing us into the harsh light of the instagram influencersphere would kill us instantly. 

rereading this Shakespearean fanfic article and weeping with joy

In a world of undead authors and readers unsure of their own critical authority, fanfiction provides a unique avenue in which to actively undercut the positivism of traditional approaches to interpretation. Even subversive theoretical lenses like gender studies, queer theory, and presentism are trapped (for reasons both necessary and infuriating) by the standards and restrictions in place that are meant to ensure strong academic rigour but nonetheless silence more radical discourses. Fanfiction resists this restriction because it is paradoxical – fanfiction exists in the limen between genre and myth and provides unique opportunities for rewritings by the young, the amateur, and the academic alike. Fandom prizes qualities more often derided and refused in traditional academic circles: emotion, self-insertion, and subjectivity. These qualities have been historically derided as feminized – and thus less critical – approaches to texts and prizing these qualities places a premium in fandom on rewritings that are grounded in a reader’s subjective response to a text and encourages remythologization of historically enforced readings of those texts. 

Source: Finn, Kavita Mudan, and Jessica McCall. “Exit, Pursued by a Fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe.” Critical Survey 28, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 27–38. https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2016.280204.  

this article is so good I have decided to start nailing it to the doors of all the English departments in the land

MLA listservs will be like “she wears a lot of stripey and polka dot dresses, honestly she looks pretty normal, but then if you say ‘hey stop that’ she shrieks JUSTICE FOR FANDOM and runs away”

Fanfiction: A strange phenomenon in which obsessive readers quit caring about physical books only to become even more obsessive readers.

Man, I am here for fan studies scholars popping into mainstream media to be like “yeah, no, your thing’s not special, this is what happens in fandoms everywhere.”

It would be difficult to describe my excitement that a major SF publisher is now including AO3-style tags in book descriptions. Tor.com is being the change I want to see in the world.

this hurtfully does not include Ann McClellan’s Sherlock’s World but I will try to make peace with it

look I have no way of evaluating the correctness of this breakdown of Phish fandom but I enJOY it.

I drew this after reading an article by a self-described ‘fandom grandma’ – (I’m not linking to it because of Tumblr’s stupid rule about hiding posts with links in the tags.) But you can check out her blog and the article @spockslash. I wish I could share this with her but this will have to be my way of saying thank you.

dear diary it is my first day back at work and already the media persists in putting a space in the word fanfiction

even when they at first don’t put it and I get all hopeful

eventually they put it

Tumblrpocalypse Special, Part 10

Today’s scholarly reaction to the Tumblrpocalypse comes from Fanhackers’ very own elmyra, originally posted in a short Twitter thread. Just a (non-exhaustive) list of things that Tumblr gave birth to, or nurtured, that we’re going to lose.

“Further thoughts on the Tumblrpocalypse: We’re going to lose queer and sex worker and fannish communities en masse. We’re also going to lose entire art forms like mood boards and porn gifs and the kind of communal, conversational storytelling that happens in tags.

Oh yeah you know what else was largely born on Tumblr? Asexual activism. As was a whole chunk of non-binary activism and black feminist thought. The concept of misogynoir (credit to @thetrudz).

Honestly, I am angry and terrified of the monumental losses we’re going to suffer as a result of this.”

I knew that what I had seen in my students when writing anonymously was often, glaringly, what happened when they didn’t feel they had to be “literary.” It made me laugh—sort of—to see, by the evidence of what they wrote when they weren’t writing under their own names for the writing teacher’s approval, that “literary” apparently meant abstract, cold, boring, plotless, obscure, and devoid of joy.

This piece is interesting but I also wish so much that these writers were ever in conversation with fandom. There’s a lotttttt to be said about libido and anonymity and literariness and experimentation in fanfic, and I’d have loved this piece to get into that.

Tumblrpocalypse Special, Part 1

As the Tumblrpocalypse unfolds, we have asked fan studies scholars and Tumblr researchers for their reactions to Tumblr banning adult content and the consequences this is likely to have. Some are scholarly and analytical, some are deeply personal. We’ll be posting them here over the next few days as they come in.

To start us off, a very personal reflection by @ludi-ling:

“I abandoned DeviantART for Tumblr. It allowed me to talk to my fellow Romy fans in a way I’d never before been able to on other platforms, and now we have built a small but meaningful community, of people I now consider not just fellow fans, but friends. I learned to embrace my sexuality through Tumblr. It is a place of much joy to me, not simply as a place to research, but a place to be creative, to discuss fandom, to build fandoms, and to make connections with people… in short - everything I have come to love and everything I will be sad to lose.”

If you missed the Fan Studies Network-North America conference, I’ve got a recap for you!

(I got lost a lot.)

(I’m worried @fanstudiesnetwork won’t like me calling them FSN: Mothership but we’ll see.)

the time Samuel Richardson did a beta read on a Clarissa fanfic

y’all, this last chapter of Natasha Simonova’s Early Modern Authorship and Prose Continuations: Adaptation and Ownership from Sidney to Richardson is my everything.

So okay, this lady wrote an alternate ending for Clarissa where Clarissa doesn’t get raped and also DOESN’T GET MARRIED: “She shou’d in time have recover’d her health, & have liv’d to her hearts Content, a private life, in the neighbourhood of her Dear Miss Howe, & to the Edification of all arround her.” And she told Samuel Richardson about it and he was like “okay okay okay send it my way” and she DID and he BETA’d it for her:

Once Richardson finally received the narrative...the relation between author and reader is temporarily reversed. Now it is Echlin who is aware that her work wants ‘correction’ (5.20), and Richardson who seeks to provide it: ... “You make young Norton happy in both Father and Mother. The Book makes it one of Mrs. Norton’s Merits, that she was a...dutiful Wife to a careless...Husband.”

There is so much more, this is just the smallest glimpse of one of the most charming book chapters that ever I have read.

Okay, that’s the good news, here’s the great news: Palgrave is doing a Black Friday sale from now until November 26th, and you can get this or any Palgrave ebook for $15. You’re welcome.

if I do nothing else with my life I am going to make the dictionaries change this so help me God