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JFS 2 (1) pp. 73–82 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of Studies Volume 2 Number 1 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jfs.2.1.73_1

Francesca Coppa Muhlenberg College

Fuck yeah, Fandom is Beautiful

Abstract Keywords First-wave ethnographic work in , especially that of , fandom Camille Bacon-Smith, Constance Penley, Roberta Pearson and John Tulloch, ethnography remains foundational to contemporary fan scholarship. Jenkins’ work in particular Henry Jenkins remains relevant for its ongoing commitment to fandom as a social identity and as identity a network; this contrasts sharply with the work of later scholars who see fandom as network a matter of enthusiastic but individual engagement. It is important for fan scholars both to revisit and to emulate first-wave scholarship because the terms of the rela- cooptation tionship between fans and the entertainment industry are being radically renegoti- ated. Fandom is increasingly understood to have economic and promotional value to content producers, and there is a danger that fandom-as-enthusiasm is being encouraged by producers even as fans are in danger of being alienated from their creative labour and from each other as a community.

In the introduction to their 2007 book, Fandom: Identities and Communities In A Mediated World, editors Jonathan Gray et al. delineate ‘three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades’ (2007: 1) The first wave of fan studies – including the work not only of Henry Jenkins, but also of Constance Penley, Roberta Pearson, John Tulloch and Camille Bacon-Smith – is summarized as the ‘Fandom is Beautiful’ phase. Gray et al. argue that, like other ‘early stages of identity politics’, first-wave fandom work attempts to redeem previously pathologized fan activities such as attending conventions, writing,

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1. Science fiction fans and letter-writing campaigns as ‘creative, thoughtful, and productive’ (2007: 3) have historically characterized their but that it does this at the expense of maintaining a ‘non-fan/fan binary’ that own engagement risks erasing what they see as the more typical sort of fan: those ‘who merely with fandom as either love a show, watch it religiously, talk about it, and yet engage in no other FIAWOL or FIJAGH; that is, Fandom Is A Way Of fan practices or activities’. In doing this, Gray et al. follow Abercrombie and Life or Fandom Is Just A Longhurst, who redefine the kind of fans talked about by the first wave as Goddamned Hobby. ‘cultists’ or ‘enthusiasts’ (words I have never heard fans use to describe them- selves), reserving ‘fan’ for those who are ‘attached to certain programmes or stars’ but ‘not yet in contact with other people who share their attachments’. That is to say: the fans described by the ‘Fandom is Beautiful’ scholars appar- ently no longer qualify after the audit, and the fandom of Fandom no longer describes a community of people, but ‘the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text’ (Sandvoss 2007: 22). It’s hard for me not to hear something patronizing, or perhaps just skeptical, in the labelling of that first wave as ‘Fandom is Beautiful’. But as a fan as well as a scholar, I respond, ‘Fuck yeah, Fandom Is Beautiful’, a reply based on the current fashion for creating wildly affirmative Tumblr sites (Van Luling 2010): see, for instance, fuckyeahfandom or fuckyeahfanvideos or fuck- yeahsherlock, etc. Fan studies has lately been reconsidering questions of meth- odology; in a recent article in this journal, ‘Augmenting fan/academic dialogue: New directions in fan research’ (2013), Paul Booth suggests a return to the ethnographic methods of the first wave. He also suggests that fan scholars try harder to engage with fans themselves; Booth, I note, has recently been attending conventions (including the large Doctor Who convention where he researched his article) and engaging with self-described fans much like Jenkins, Penley, Bacon-Smith and other first wavers did. Gray et al. posit later waves of fan scholarship as correctives to the implic- itly rosy views of the ‘Fandom is Beautiful’ crew; these later scholars have, by this accounting, broadened the scope of enquiry to include less marginal- ized fannish objects (country music, the Yankees, Sex in the City) and discus- sions of the psychological relationship between individual fans and their fan objects. But arguably this broadening of subject represents a change of subject. It seems unfair to say that early fandom scholars overlooked the broad spec- trum of regular fans to focus on ‘the smallest subset of fan groups’ (Gray et al. 2007: 8) – the creators and participators for whom fandom was a way of life1 – when that was precisely their defined object of study. In fact, in the first chapter of Textual Poachers (1992), Jenkins takes pains to distinguish between the Dallas (Jacobs, 1978) viewers studied by Ien Ang (1985), who watched TV largely in isolation, and the Star Trek and media fans that he himself is interested in; it’s a passage worth quoting at length:

The Dallas viewers wrote in isolation, watching the program in their own homes with little or no acknowledgment that others shared their enthusiasm for the series… Ang’s respondents were Dallas fans only in the narrow sense that they watched the program regularly but they lacked social connections to a larger network of fans and did not partici- pate in the complex fan culture described here. The Trekkers, however, see themselves as already participating in a larger social and cultural community, as speaking not only for themselves but also for Star Trek fans more generally. These fans often draw strength and courage from their ability to identity themselves as members of a group of other fans who shared common interests and confronted common problems. To

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speak as a fan is to accept what has been labeled a subordinated posi- 2. Scholars who doubt me have never heard tion within the cultural hierarchy, to accept an identity constantly belit- a woman described tled or criticized by institutional authorities. Yet is it also to speak from as ‘fan shaped’, a position of collective identity, to forge an alliance with a community of i.e. significantly overweight. others in defense of tastes which, as a result, cannot be read as totally aberrant or idiosyncratic. (Jenkins 1992: 22–23)

Jenkins understands that there are ‘fans who merely love a show, watch it religiously, talk about it, and yet engage in no other fan practices or activities’; arguably this describes not only Ang’s Dallas fans but most regular viewers of television today (and just about everyone with a television during the last few weeks of Breaking Bad [Gilligan, 2008]). Jenkins further clarified the distinction in 1995’s Science Fiction Audiences, written with John Tulloch:

This book will, therefore, adopt a distinction between fans, active partic- ipants within fandom as a social, cultural and interpretive institution, and followers, audience members who regularly watch and enjoy media science fiction programmes but who claim no larger social identity on the basis of this consumption. (Jenkins and Tulloch 1994: 23)

Unlike Abercrombie and Longhurst, Jenkins and Tulloch reserve ‘fans’ for active participants in fandom and coin ‘followers’ for those who enjoy media but do not claim a fannish social identity. As a term, ‘followers’ also has the advantage of having anticipated by more than ten years the argot of social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, on which one can ‘follow’ a particu- lar Twitterer, Tumblrer, blogger, etc. ‘Following’ arguably characterizes social media engagement just as regular watching characterizes mass media engagement; this is to use media as directed. In fact, Richard Ohmann points to regular engagement as foundational to mass media, defining it precisely as the dependably frequent cultural experiences that create habitual audiences around common needs or interests (Ohmann 1996:14, emphasis added). This is the experience of reading the new Steven King (Doctor Sleep, I’m enjoying it!) or going to the latest James Bond at the multiplex or watching those final episodes of Breaking Bad. But in Textual Poachers (1992), Jenkins distinguishes between these ‘follow- ing’ fans and participatory fans in ways that continue to be relevant to his scholarship, and to fan scholarship more broadly. First, Jenkins is interested in what it means to self-identify as ‘a fan’, especially in a context in which claiming the identity of ‘a fan’ was to, in Foucauldian terms, declare yourself ‘a personage, a past, a case study, in addition to a type of life, a life form, and a morphology’ (Foucault 1978: 43)2 (not to mention similarly burdened by libido-driven indiscriminateness). Textual Poachers describes people who self- identify as ‘fans’ full stop, not as fans of this or that TV show, band, celebrity, team, etc; in fact, Jenkins explicitly notes that people who self-identify as fans often have interests that extend beyond ‘any single text to encompass many others within the same genre – other science fiction texts, other stories of male bonding, other narratives which explore the relationship of the outsider to the community’ (Jenkins 1992: 37). People remember Jenkins’ arguments about fans as poachers, but they sometimes forget his description of fans as nomads: constantly moving from

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one text to another and bringing their tribe along with them. This under- standing of fannish identity permeates Jenkins’ recent work on participatory culture and spreadable media; by this reading, a small number of self-defined fans – who are not committed to particular texts, but rather to a set of prac- tices that define how they interact with texts – act as (choose your jargon): mavens or loyals or media actives or prosumers or connectors or multipliers or lead users of media in ways that may be culturally important or good for business, or both. Jenkins further argues that by creating and disseminating multiple (even contradictory) readings and supplemental artworks fans also help mass media stories reach multiple audiences. This is good not only for the plurality of discourse but also for creative industries’ own bottom lines. Second, Jenkins continues to this day to be interested in fandom as a network: as a collective identity and mode of community organization. Twenty years after describing fans as those who ‘shared common interests and confronted common problems’, Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova co-edited the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism, which Jenkins defines as ‘forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself’ (Jenkins 2012: 1.8). Fan studies, Jenkins and Shresthova note in their introduction, ‘has long depicted fandom as a site of ideological and cultural resistance to the heteronormative and patriar- chal values often shaping mass media’, but recent organized activism by fans ‘pushes beyond abstract notions of cultural resistance to focus on specific ways that fan culture has affected debates around law and public policy’ (2012: 1.9). Their epigraph – from Steven Duncombe’s essay, ‘Imagining no-place’ – simi- larly evokes a definition of fandom as participatory:

Scratch an activist and you’re apt to find a fan. It’s no mystery why: fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different norms, laws, and structures than those we expe- rience in our ‘real’ lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to imagine alter- natives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism. (2012: 1)

Duncombe’s understanding of fandom as something fundamentally social is radically different from Sandvoss’s definition of fandom as ‘the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text’. But it’s the social descriptions of fandom in the work of the first-wave scholars that I recognize, and that echo in my head when the student coming to do her thesis on Batman tells me that everyone in her residence hall is a fan, and they all sit around together writing fanfic on their laptops, or when my research assistant tells me that she’s participating in Vidders4ACause, a challenge where vidders make fanvids for charity. While some of the analysis in Bacon- Smith’s Enterprising Women strikes me as off-key, the pictures she paints – despite being 20 years old – are still vibrant and familiar:

A man in a ten gallon hat approaches [a table at a ] and wants to know what is going on. There is a gleam in his eye: he sees only women about. Not all of them are pretty – some of them are middle- aged, or overweight, or both. They all return his bravado with suspicion.

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Lois, in her late forties and looking very prim, looks up from her place at 3. These are not abstract to me. My husband the registration table and smiles the smile of PTA mothers everywhere. once asked me how it ‘It’s a meeting of a ladies’ literary society,’ she answers very properly. was that, wherever we go, someone turns up ‘Mighty nice,’ the ten gallon hat responds. at our hotel and takes me to lunch? I have had As he walks away, another voice at the table whispers: ‘And terrorist fans send me boxes of videocassettes, society’. pimping their show; (1991: 3–4) artwork illustrating scenes from my fan fiction; I have As someone who’s been flummoxed by the innocently asked question, ‘How a full-sized fannish do you know So-And-So?’ (‘Writing group!’ ‘Book club!’ ‘Friend of a friend gameboard for Cluedo of a…’) I can say that the scene strikes me as accurate, as does Bacon-Smith’s framed on my office wall (the slash version description of ‘the grins and giggles and the pajama party atmosphere’ (espe- is called Crude-o, and cially when the women are in their 40s). Similarly, Penley in NASA/Trek suggests slash plots records a comment that could have been made yesterday: rather than murder solutions: so not Miss Scarlett with One of America’s most respected female science fiction writers, who has a candlestick in the library but Kirk and more than dabbled in slash writing (and who wishes to go unnamed) Spock undercover told poet and novelist Marge Piercy, who told me, ‘Forget Breadloaf. in gay bar); I got my Forget the Iowa Writers Workshop. Slash fandom is the best writing invitation to Hogwarts: did you? I also have workshop in the country’. gotten boxes of second- (1998: 112) hand kids’ clothes sent to my son, who has a thousand fannish fairy Compare this to ’s remark in the Organization For Transformative godmothers, who sent Works’ (OTW) comment to the US National Telecommunications and Infor­ toys and pajamas with spaceships on them mation Administration (NTIA) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO): and his first Star Trek onesie. That being Participating in the fanfiction community gave me not merely better said, I have also lived through many fannish writing skills, but a community in which to learn taste and get feedback. flamewars and the 2011 A dozen people from that community gave me feedback on that criti- OTW Board Election, cal first novel as I wrote it, the feedback of passionate readers instead of so I know the evil that fans do. Fandom has other writers or editors. I have never gotten comparable feedback in any all the upsides and the writers’ workshop or from any instructor ever. downsides of any other (Organization For Transformative Works 2013: 39) community.

Do not get me wrong: I am not actually trying to argue that fandom is some sort of utopia. As my colleague Rebecca Tushnet wryly notes elsewhere in this volume, ‘Fandom is made of people, and people are sometimes awful to each other’ (2014: 22). But fandom is made of people with all their imperfections as well as their strengths, and for every flame war or rivalry there are corre- sponding acts of friendship and generosity,3 not to mention opportunities for collective action. And a fan studies that takes as its subject the self-identified fans who participate in some kind of fan culture - as writers, artists, vidders, film-makers, con organizers, community moderators, coders, archivists, game designers, bloggers, wikifiers, cosplayers, beta readers, gif-makers, episode reviewers, fanwork critics, fandom activists, and more – is a fan studies that is focused on a rapidly growing network that can have, and is having, huge real world effects. It’s great that we are seeing so many fan writers on the New York Times best-sellers list, and that some fan vidders are making money doing film editing or creating book trailers, and that fannish sysadmins and coders are stepping forward to take information technology jobs; this is similar to Abercrombie and Longhurst’s description of how organized fandom’s focus

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4. Fannish convention on productivity can turn an ‘enthusiast’ into a ‘petty producer’ who makes and spaces like Wiscon have elaborate policies; sells things in the broader marketplace. This is not trivial; as Tushnet points see http://wiscon.info/ out in the NTIA/PTO comment referenced above, developing these sorts of access.php. skills is ‘particularly important for members of underrepresented groups, who can use them as alternate pathways to success when conventional, majority groups are unwelcoming’ (Organization For Transformative Works 2013: 3). This changes the market and changes the culture. But at the same time, this group social participation is also important to the people involved. Being in fandom can change a person, who in taking on the identity of ‘fan’ may also come to take on additional identities – that of a writer, blogger, film-maker, organizer, activist, etc. – that impact her sense of self and the way she engages the world. In particular, there is a critical sensi- bility that comes from engaging culture from the inside, as someone with a defined role in the cultural ecosystem. Fandom, like other remix and read/ write cultures, not to mention artistic subcultures, blurs the binaries between artist and audience (Sinnreich 2010: 43–58), or more accurately reblurs it; historically, culture was not made by specialists. Even today, the guys stand- ing by the bar at punk concerts tend to be in bands (Fonarow 1997: 366–67), and the audiences at poetry readings are disproportionately likely to be poets. Theatre people go to the theatre more than regular people; classical musicians hear more chamber music, etc. Only in mass media, and only for a relatively short amount of time, was there a sense that specialist-creators were speaking to an inexpert audience, one incapable of making judgments, and that there- fore required a class of specialist critics. But that is not the case in fandom; as in these other arts communities, fans approach mass media with a vested interest. We watch tonight’s episode with an eye to writing tomorrow’s blog post. It may inspire our next story or piece of fan art, or provide the perfect shot for our vid-in-progress. Larger issues of social good aside, this vocational way of engaging in culture is just boatloads of fun: this century’s equivalent of the sing-a-long, the backyard show, the community dance. Petty production and media consumption aside, fandom provides a mode of social organization that has the potential to move from being a subcul- ture (that is, a social group based on common interests) to a community (that is, based on shared geography, kinship, or history) (Thornton 1997: 2). It seems obvious now that the fannish ‘circles’ that Bacon-Smith described as being the extended family structure of core fans (1991: 26) were impor- tant alternative social structures that met the needs of their participants. Some acafans have been rereading first-wave fan fiction to rethink its gender and sexuality politics (Busse and Lothian, draft manuscript): even from this short distance, the world now looks so different (alternative sexualites main- streamed, sexual differences more acceptable, kinks being discussed) that one has to wonder what in the first wave books was unsaid or, more to the point, unsayable. Someone also ought to reread the first wave (as well as do new fannish ethnography) through the lens of disability studies; fandom has a high percentage of disabled participants, and is concerned with issues of accessibility (both digital and meatspace)4 and positive disability representa- tion in a way that is still not mainstream. Media fandom also tends to consider a range of mental and emotional sensitivities as well as physical disabilities (neurotypicality is increasingly cited as a basis of discrimination), particularly when it comes to triggering issues like rape or sexual assault; for instance, at the fan fiction archive, the Archive of Our Own (AO3), writers are required either to warn for rape or nonconsensual sex or explicitly to choose not to

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warn for those things, and through the wonder of the AO3’s curated folkson- 5. The AO3 uses a 5 curated folksonomy omy a reader can make fine distinctions between nonconsensual sex, dubious whereby users consent, rape fantasy, under-negotiated kink, rape culture and more. This is generate their own what information science looks like in a feminist universe, and aside from any individual tags and a group of volunteers impact this has on mainstream culture (and it’s having some; I was recently links up similar terms the keynote speaker at the Midwestern Archivists Association, the annual behind the scenes; meeting of archivists, library curators, and information professionals), it’s a this allows for both individual expression universe that larger and larger numbers of people actually live in much – even and maximum all – of the time. searchability. I believe that citizenship is this universe is what Jenkins is referring to when he argues, in his wonderfully polite but dissenting afterward to Fandom (2007), that ‘fandom is the future’. Jenkins continues to be our most powerful advocate for this explicitly communal vision of fandom:

Again, let me say it, fandom is the future. I use the word ‘fandom’ and not ‘fans’ here for a good reason. To me, it seems a little paradoxical that the rest of the people involved in this conversation are more and more focused on consumption as a social, networked, collaborative process (‘harnessing collective intelligence,’ ‘the wisdom of crowds,’ and all of that) whereas so much of the recent work in fan studies has returned to a focus on the individual fan. (Jenkins 2007: 361, original emphasis)

Fandom is the future partly because technology now makes it much easier for people to engage in the networked, participatory behaviors which were once so difficult that to engage in them marked one as an obsessive person- ality: it’s easier to post fan fiction online than to edit zines, easier to remix video with Windows Movie Maker than with VHS tape, easier to watch TV communally using Google Hangout than to fly to a con, easier to convert your friends to your favourite show when they can just call it up on Hulu: no more hours spent duping fourth generation video cassettes. It also makes it easier for fandom to organize and advocate for itself (as well as for others); to record its history, or to organize testimony, for example. Technology makes it easier for people to engage in a diverse array of fannish activities – and also simply to learn that this beautiful thing called ‘fandom’ exists, and that they can be a part of it. But it’s not just potential fans who have discovered fandom; technology has also made fandom and its activities more visible to the entertainment industry (the folks that fans have historically called ‘the powers that be’). Jenkins saw that the relationship between organized fandom and entertainment corpora- tions was going to change radically, and argued in his afterward that:

We need to accept that what we used to call cooptation also involves a complex set of negotiations during which the media industries have to change to accommodate the demands of consumers even as they train consumers to behave in ways that are beneficial to their interests. (Jenkins 2007: 362)

One could argue that Jenkins’ career ever since then – including his 2009 move from MIT to USC – has been in service of aiding and smoothing these compli- cated set of negotiations; Jenkins has become acafandom’s MVP in terms of mediating the emerging fan/industry relationship.

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And yet, it seems to me that Jenkins too easily waves away the potential for ‘what we used to call cooptation’ of fan communities and networks, though to be fair, he wrote this before Imeem, Blip, Bam Vid Vault and other video sites failed or TOSsed their user-generated content, before Amazon’s Kindle Worlds made its play to create a market for fan fiction (inserting itself into the process by which some fans become professionals, and potentially taking a cut of those creative works large enough to stop most people from making a living at it), and before the FanLib debacle that led fans (including me) to create the nonprofit OTW (Hellekson 2009: 117–18). It was before YouTube began to make the ad deals that create and divert the profits from fan-made works – including transformative fair uses which belong to their fan creators – to movie studios and record companies. Scholars like Abigail DeKosnik (herself incred- ibly prescient in seeing that fandom was rapidly approaching its ‘Sugarhill moment’; that is, ‘the moment when an outsider takes up a subculture’s inven- tion and commodifies it for the mainstream before insiders do’ [2009: 119–20]), Susanne Scott, , Kristina Busse, Shannon Farley, and others have joined first wavers like Jenkins and Pearson (DeKosnik 2013; Scott 2009; Hellekson 2009; Busse and Farley 2013; Pearson 2010) in trying to reimagine what fandom could and should be in this rapidly changing economic land- scape. (The March 2014 issue of Transformative Works and Cultures is devoted to the issue of Fandom and/as Labor.) It is also a crucial question for emerging scholars (Noppe 2011; Stanfill 2013; Jones 2014); for instance, in a two-part blog post made after the debut of Kindle Worlds, Mel Stanfill argued that it ‘is part of a broader shift to incite fans-the-individuals to ever greater invest- ment and involvement but manage them through disarticulating them from the troublesome resistive capacity of fandom-the-community’ (Stanfill 2013). We should ask ourselves who benefits from this disarticulation. So now, more than ever, it is important to remember that fandom is made of people, and that fandom is beautiful, because fandom’s in danger of being owned: our work, our communications, our relationships to and with each other. Fandom is more than its economic/revenue potential. If fannish participation is reduced to ‘likes’ and ‘reblogs’, if technology keeps drawing our attention to official Tumblrs and Twitters and YouTube channels (who will get paid for all the eyeballs they bring, and if even fan-made content becomes a source of industry revenues), if all of fandom starts to look like Comic Con, i.e. an industry convention disguised as a fan convention, we run the risk of reducing all fans to followers.

References Ang, Ian. (1985), Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London: Methuen. Bacon-Smith, C. (1991), Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Booth, Paul. (2013), ‘Augmenting fan/academic dialogue: New directions in fan research’, Journal of Fandom Studies, 1: 2, pp. 119–137. Busse, K. and Farley, S. (2013), ‘Remixing the Remix: Ownership and Appropriation within Fan Communities’, in M/C Journal, 16.4, http://jour- nal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/659. Accessed 4 February 2014. Busse, K. and Lothian, A. (in press), ‘A history of slash sexualities: Debating queer sex, gay politics, and media fan cultures’, in F. Attwood, The Sex, Sexuality, and Media Handbook, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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DeKosnik, A. (2009), ‘Should fan fiction be free?’, Cinema Journal, 48: 4, pp. 119–20. —— (2013), ‘Interrogating “Free” fan labor’, in Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (eds), Spreadable Media, New York: Press. Web exclusive essay, http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/kosnik/#. UvAfq3ddXjA. Accessed 3 February 2014. Duncombe, S. (2012), ‘Imagining no-place’, Transformative Works and Culture, 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0350. Fonarow, W. (1997), ‘The spatial organization of the Indie music gig’, in Sarah Thornton and Ken Gelder (eds), The Subcultures Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 366–67. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, New York: Pantheon. Gilligan, Vince (2008), Breaking Bad, Santa Monica: High Bridge Entertainment. Gray, J., Sandvoss, C. and Harrington, L. (2007), ‘Introduction: Why study fans’, in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and Lee Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities In A Mediated World, New York: New York University Press, pp. 1–16. Hellekson, K. (2009), ‘A fannish field of value: Online gift culture’, Cinema Journal, 48: 4, pp. 113–118. Jacobs, David (1978), Dallas, Los Angeles: Lorimar. Jenkins, H. (1992), Textual Poachers, New York: Routledge. —— (2012), ‘Cultural acupuncture: Fan activism and the alliance’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 10, doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0305. Jenkins, H. and Shresthova, S. (2012), ‘Up, up, and away! the power and poten- tial of fan activism’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 10, doi:10.3983/ twc.2012.0435. Jenkins, H. and Tulloch, J. (1994), Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who, New York: Routledge. Jones, B. (2014), ‘Fifty shades of fan labor: Exploitation and 50 Shades of Gray’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 15, http://journal.transformativeworks. org/index.php/twc. Noppe, N. (2011), ‘Why we should talk about commodifying fan work’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 8, doi: 103983/twc.2011.0369. Ohmann, R. (1996), Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century, London: Verso. Organization for Transformative Works (2013), ‘OTW comment to the NTIA/ PTO’, http://transformativeworks.org/news/otws-legal-committee-com- ments-ntiapto. Accessed 5 December 2013. Pearson, R. (2010), ‘Fandom in the digital era’, Popular Communication: The Journal of International Media and Culture, 8: 1, doi: 10.1080/15405700903502346. Penley, C. (1998), NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, New York: Verso. Sandvoss, C. (2007), ‘The death of the reader’, in J. Gray, C. Sandvoss and L. Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities In A Mediated World, New York: New York University Press, pp. 19–32. Scott, S. (2009), ‘Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of anci- llary content models’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 3, doi: 10.3983/ twc.2009.0150. Sinnreich, A. (2010), Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture, Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Stanfill, M. (2013), ‘“Kindle Worlds, Part 1: The Economic Raw Deal,” and “Kindle Worlds II: The End of Fandom as we know it?”’, http://www.

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melstanfill.com/kindle-worlds-part-1-the-economic-raw-deal/; http:// www.melstanfill.com/kindle-worlds-ii-the-end-of-fandom-as-we- know-it. Accessed 5 December 2013. Stanfill, M. and Condis, M. (eds) (2014), ‘Special issue: Fandom and/as labor’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 15. Thornton, S. (1997), ‘General introduction’, The Subcultures Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–7. Tushnet, Rebecca (2014), ‘I’m a lawyer, not an ethnographer, Jim: Textual poachers and fair use’, Journal of Fandom Studies, 2: 1, p. 22. Van Luling, T. (2010), ‘The best “Fuck Yeah” Tumblrs on the Internet’, http:// flavorwire.com/96038/the-best-fuck-yeah-tumblrs-on-the-internet/. Accessed 6 December 2013.

suggested citatioN Coppa, F. (2014), ‘Fuck yeah, Fandom is Beautiful’, Journal of Fandom Studies 2: 1, pp. 73–82, doi: 10.1386/jfs.2.1.73_1

Contirbutor details Francesca Coppa is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College and a found- ing member of the Organization For Transformative Works, a nonprofit estab- lished by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. An acafan and fan advocate, she has lectured and written widely on fan arts such as fan fiction and , as well as on fandom’s influence on the development of trans- and social media. She is currently editing a fan fiction reader and writing a history of fan music video for the University of Iowa press. Contact: Muhlenberg College, 2400 Chew Street, Allentown, PA 18104, USA. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

Francesca Coppa has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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