Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Current Issue

In the wake of the ongoing turmoil caused by J. K. Rowling’s tweets expressing transphobic prejudice, hurt fans must decide what, if any, future relationship they will have with the Harry Potter series. This article argues that the books provide a training ground for young people learning to grapple with difficult issues like problematic heroes, and that engaging in two kinds of fan activities can enable fans to continue to find value in Harry Potter while simultaneously registering their objections to prejudice and bias. These two activities are literary analysis and fan fiction, and both empower fans to articulate the problems of social justice in sustained, thoughtful ways that other short-form mediums like social media do not.

To explore how celebrity memorabilia collectors use their memorabilia collections to engage with a media persona(e), we draw from two distinct concepts. The first concept is Brown’s definition of celebrity worship. This serves as the lens to explore how audiences engage in this process of worship. Specific attention is given to three key anchor points within this definition: commitment, love and devotion. The second concept is Maltby’s three levels of celebrity worship. This provides a framework to explain the ways in which the memorabilia collectors use their collections to conform or disconform to various levels of celebrity worship. A total of 21 in-depth interviews were conducted with collectors of celebrity memorabilia. Findings support a need for a total reconceptualization of celebrity worship levels and an introduction of a newly conceptualized level to adequately explain celebrity memorabilia collectors. Furthermore, findings also suggest a conceptual unity between the two concepts. Overall, our study provides a more diverse way of understanding celebrity memorabilia collectors.

Studies of the reasons fans transform texts for the most part leave unanswered the question of why particular kinds of texts are transformed by fans more frequently than others. All texts are technically available for fan transformation. However, not all texts are equally transformed. It is an objective fact that some TV shows attract more transformative fan engagement than others. In this article, I argue that formal properties of texts make them more likely to be subject to transformative fan works, i.e. more transformable. Shows that (1) posit a plastic universe that more easily accommodates ‘play’ than realism, (2) involve stories that follow some of the narrative conventions of melodrama and (3) display main characters with ‘ship’ – especially homoerotic ‘slash’ – potential have transformable canons. To prove this thesis, I examine two of the shows – and their respective fanfiction – that have the most fanfiction on FanFiction.net and ArchiveOfOurOwn.org: Supernatural and Sherlock.

Review of: Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal, Jessica Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid (eds) (2020)

Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 262 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-49682-701-2, p/bk, $35.00

Review of: Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness, Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey (2020)

New York: New York University Press, 271 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47980-535-8, p/bk, $30.00

Review of: A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises, Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill (2020)

Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 234 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-49683-047-0, p/bk, $30.00