BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV

THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF ARTS

EXAMINATION OF FAN WORK AS AVANT-GARDE CONTEMPORARY ART

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE (M.A)

ARIELLA MENAKER

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF: DR. NEA EHRLICH

OCTOBER 2019

BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF ARTS

EXAMINATION OF FAN WORK AS AVANT-GARDE CONTEMPORARY ART

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE (M.A.)

ARIELLA MENAKER

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR. NEA EHRLICH

Signature of student: ______Date: ______Signature of supervisor: ______Date: ______Signature of chairperson of the M.A. committee: ______Date: ______

OCTOBER 2019

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis advisor, Dr. Nea Ehrlich, and the entire

Arts department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, for their patience, guidance and knowledge.

I would like to thank Prof. Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, I would not have started this degree if it were not for our lengthy conversation about the department. To Dr. Ronit Milano, for calming me down and keeping me focused.

I would also like to thank Dr. Merav Yerushalmy, I am truly deeply grateful that you recognized I had a research subject in fan works, even before I realized.

Lastly, I would like to thank all my family and friends that stood by me through everything; Yael

Barkai and Matan Sandler, thank you for years of study sessions. I love and appreciate you all. Abstract

Popular culture refers to the familiar cultural ideas that are considered significant at a given time in a given society. Fans of popular media culture (of any kind, sports, TV, music, etc.) may participate in fan activity and devote their time and talents, visual or literary, to creating what is defined as fan works or works - fanart, fanfiction, fanvid and so on. For example, Harry Potter- based book and movie fanfare will feature various references to the characters, a world of "magical realism," wizards, magical creatures, and of course, the plot line. Fan work is the umbrella term I chose to use in this text in reference to fan creation, across multiple mediums of activity. You can say that fan activity today is a broader global culture than ever. It is a creative space that has blossomed outside of formal and commercial establishments, enabling people around the world to consume, create and share works from a shared content world. Popular culture content, along with an active fan base, constitutes a 'fandom', fan / kingdom space.

This study asks whether fan work is a form of avant-garde contemporary art. I chose to focus on fan works with queer themes, known as “slash”, specifically dealing with queer social identity in relation to the marriage equality global movement. The study demonstrates various challenges of fan work and fan art, across many areas combined with forensic testing, regarding the fair use and copying rights of intellectual property. At the beginning of the study, I anticipated that the avant- garde value of fan work would be related to the extent to which fan activities directly challenged the establishment. However, I found that the very concept of what fan work is limited.

The first section What, When & Where opens with a cultural research review of the modern conception of a fan, along with parallel perceptions in Britain and the United States of the late 19th century of the phenomenon of media participation alongside media culture, or as they were often

I called, consumer culture. Pointing to events that led to the formation of a contemporary culture of participation and fandom culture, moreover, I address the tension between media culture and print capitalism and the gray place in which fan work exists, which will illustrate various challenges facing fan and fan jobs, including fair use issues, and fair use issues. Around some major terms, such as appropriation, iconology. The first part of the discussion closes with some gender-based and gender-based theories that will be used to decipher the corpus below, as I delve into the emergence of queer culture and tools in fandom. Further, in the connection between art and reality/activism, I place fan works in the iconoclash discourse - the power struggle between worshiping symbols and icons and the desire to destroy and destroy them. Fan work has the ability to tackle a complicated and controversial social taboo; fan artists are able to create a work that is familiar yet introduces major changes in texts, both visual and literary. In doing so, fan artists act as agents performing foreign images to make a sound for the inaugural, thus challenging and even affecting canonical and state realities. The study shows case studies of works that use images from popular media culture, such as Disney - not all of them are “officially” labeled as fan works.

Creations that can be seen as fan works are increasingly common, though they are rarely labeled as such outside fandom, i.e. defined fan spaces. This issue raises many questions, such as how much a fan is capable of sharing their fan outreach work? What types of creative avenues, if any, are available to them in everyday life? And if they have creative avenues, then, are they creating fan works or “original” work?

In my opinion, the difference between fan work and the work of production companies or 'official' artists is a matter of control and the right to intellectual property. Those in charge of large advertising agencies, who have long enjoyed the ability to shape the media, find that there are

II others who do the same and even through their 'images'. I argue that in the work is change, in our global world “activity” is “activism” and fan work is art.

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Contents

Introduction ...... 2

Part I: What, When & Where ...... 13

The Framing of Fan & Fandom ...... 14

Print Capitalism & Fan ‘Poaching’ ...... 19

Queer, Fandom & Fan Work ...... 26

Part II: Art World Perspectives ...... 39

Contextual Review ...... 39

Iconoclash? ...... 42

Exhibition & Dissemination Spaces ...... 47

Conclusions and Suppositions ...... 65

References ...... 68

List of Figures ...... 78

Figures...... 80

Introduction

I first encountered fan works by accident. As a closeted teenager in the early 2000s, I sorely lacked queer spaces, and there weren’t many such themes around me or on television. I vaguely remember when Ellen DeGeneres came out, literally and figuratively, and the controversy that ensued. I remember when George Michaels’ Outside came out, watching and humming along without truly grasping what it is I am witnessing and hearing. I watched Xena: Warrior Princess religiously, reading every single subtext I could find that will confirm my belief that Xena and

Gabrielle are a couple and are in love. I did not start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer until I heard from friends that one of the characters is either gay or bisexual. I watched Queer as Folk as soon as it started broadcasting. Looking back, watching it as I did, underaged and unsupervised, was wholly inappropriate, but at the time it felt as one of the few accesses within my reach to queer life; distorted as it was by the mechanics of Hollywood the media industry. I would look up additional information online, try to better understand themes from the show, and search for the occasional recap for missed episodes. It was then I encountered fan fiction – fiction written by fans of the shows, about the shows. Some fan fiction, I found, centered on plot holes and cliffhangers, others completely transformed the theme of the show, moving the characters to other times and places – basically doing every possible thing, or so it felt. I found out shortly that fan fiction was just the tip of the iceberg, that there is a whole world of fandom, fan dominion, and fan work - fan art, fan videos and even fan groups for people from all over the world. I was mesmerized.

Popular culture ascribes to the commonly known, mainstream cultural ideas that are deemed as significant at a given time in a given society (Adorno, 1975). The term ‘media culture’ refers in cultural studies to the Western capitalist society which arose and grew under the onslaught of

2 mass media (Thomas, 2012, 30). Popular culture is the product of repetitive commonplace social interactions with both other individuals and the ideas that are deem important themselves, thus the reality of contemporary everyday lives is saturated with pop culture and the influence of mass media (McGaha, 2015, pp. 32-37). Fans of popular media culture (of any genre, such as sports, comics television etcetera) may partake in “fannish”, fan-like, activity and spend their time and skills, visual or literary, to create what has been classified as fan works – fanart, fanfiction, fanvid and so on. For example, a fan work based on Harry Potter books and films will contain various references to the characters, their world of “magical realism”, wizards, magical creatures, and of course the plot line. Fan Work is the umbrella term I chose to use in this text in reference to fan works corpus, across multiple mediums of fan activity.

Most, if not all of the fan work I initially consumed was queer, i.e. LGBTQ+ characters and themes. As I started my fan journey around a show titled Queer as Folk I didn’t pay it much thought, until I noticed a repetitive word showing up in fan work descriptions – “Slash”. A short online search provided the answer; slash is a term for fan works that place two same sex/gender characters in a romantic or sexual relationship. It soon became apparent that fans do this all the time, regardless of the characters disposition according to canon. I discovered the romance I imagined between Xena and Gabrielle was materialized online by other fans, and just so for multiple shows and books I was familiar with - with fan slash pairings I have never considered; allowing me to interact freely with queer content that was just not done on mainstream media.

Further in this paper I will discuss Fandoms, which are extremely fluid as they are subject to change by introduction of new canonic media (a new book, movie, etc. of the original series), developments of fan-canon, as well as fluctuations in fan demographics. Subsequently, the margins of fan creations are ever-changing and redefined in accordance to temporal and

3 localized circumstances. In Adolescents and online fan-fiction (Black, 2008), the author points to a at the time lacking research field, which ignores heavy demographic changes from “adult science fiction and daytime soap opera fans to a transnational and multilingual population that is dominated by adolescents from across the globe” (Black, 2008, p. 14). In the decade following the volume’s publication, online platform presence has increased and with it online social habits and practices, which undoubtedly created even more demographic diversity within fandom, contributing to the rich variety of fan productions (Hellekson & Busse, CFP: "Theorizing Fan

Fiction and Fan Communities", 2004). Usually, people are not very familiar with the discourse within fandoms. Although some heard about E. L. James, now a best-selling author of the Fifty

Shades of Grey trilogy (2011-2017) and its companion novels, and a former fan fiction writer.

For the uninformed, the trilogy started out as a smutty Twilight fan fiction online by a at the time anonymous fan fiction writer (Alter, 2012). The fan fiction was removed from online space and after some edits became a global media franchise of books and feature films that in turn generated its own fandom and fan works.

I never felt a very active member of ‘fandom’, because my interaction was mostly through consumption of both commercial media and fan work, and by joining anonymous fan groups online. I remember reading a lot of fan fiction dealing with the American Don't Ask, Don't Tell

(DADT) policy while I was doing mandatory service. DADT, was the official US policy on military service by “gays, bisexuals, and lesbians”, instituted by the Clinton Administration.

Initiated in 1994, this controversial policy was in effect until 2011 (Nathaniel, 2013). Prior to this policy, queer people could not legally serve in the American military. The policy’s official purpose was to stop persecution and dishonorable discharge of queer people, as long as they did not openly display their lifestyle. Despite its ‘inclusive’ mandate, the DADT policy quickly

4 became a tool for witch-hunt of queer service people, and many were dishonorably discharged after being ‘discovered’ as queer by damming testimonies and admittance of visual evidence of activities – both on and off duty. As such, the policy was subject to heavy criticism and discourse, until its final demise through the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, under the

Obama administration.

Figure 1 is a still frame from the,

military based American TV show

Stargate SG-1, which is part of

Sci-Fi franchise containing several

movies and spin-offs. I honestly

do not know from when or where

1 Figure 1Unknown | n.d. I have encountered this one . The frame itself was captured from season 4 episode 16, titled “2010”, this episode which aired in

January 2001, took place in the fictional dystopian futuristic year of 2010. In this alternative future, humanity is on the brink of extinction, as over 90% of humanity has been sterilized, made infertile. This was done by the Aschen, a technologically advanced alien human race that has been portraying themselves as an ally, while working towards the eventuality of an invasion and the sole habitation of earth. The beautiful utopian facade of the Aschen’s advanced technology is what makes the inevitable extinction so devastating. It is the “Trojan horse” all over again, grand fanfare used to conceal deadly enemy force.

1 I’ve found it with a bunch of random backed up files of mine from an old computer, but that drive is also long gone.

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As portrayed earlier, fan work and fandom spaces are hardly disconnected from sociopolitical discourse and reality. Superimposed on the top left of Figure 1, in a typewriter styled font, is the following text:

“(612): no, i’m not a lesbian… i just really want to fuck you while drinking, that’s

normal in a friendship.”2

Such expressions of fan work comparison can be made to the DADA policy, which offered officially a measure of protection that was instead weaponized. Fan work dealing directly with

DADT and its possible repercussions can be found across various mediums and fandoms, especially when the referred media segment (film, television show, book, etc.) is set in the

American military or parallel agencies. Fans expressed many of the complex issues generated by

DADT, its repercussions and even its eventual, but at the time completely fictional, abolishment.

As for me, it was perfectly legal to be out and enlisted, and I was out, mostly. But I have spent many years in the closet, with all that entails, and those themes spoke to me. In my experience, the way fan work dealt with many social issues directly, especially queer ones, was renovating, and it seemed there was no limitations to the medium.

It is this perspective I chose to take on this research from. I believe fan work has the ability to confront complicated and controversial social taboos; fans are able through the creation of fan work, through inflicting change on the given texts both visual and literary. They act as de- familiarizing agents on the canonic and the mundane reality in order to give voice for the unsung. I believe fan work has such power because it uses the preexisting emotional connection that society holds for popular media culture. Despite being portrayed as relatively fringe to the

2 Written in lower-case only, true to the original text.

6 mainstream cultural media industry, fan work and fandom utilize the contemporary globalized communication platforms; the drastically increasing possibilities of interaction and distribution of ideas that joined the more classical media in the “competition” of culture creation. It is not a surprise that this participatory culture grew with the creation of Internet communities (Lothian,

Busse, & Anne Reid, 2007). It can be said that fan activity is now more so then ever a part of a broad global culture; a creative space that flourished outside the formal and commercial establishments, and enables individuals around the world to consume, create and share works from a shared content world (visual, textual, etc.). These segments of popular culture, together with an active fan-base, constitute fandom, fan domain.

All in all, I believe art has a purpose, that it serves a purpose, not in a romantic sense, rather that we as a society are practiced interpreters, who constantly find meanings in images and text

(Tohar, Asaf, Kainan, & Shahar, 2007). If that is the case, then what is the difference between creations of art and fiction, from fan works such as fan art and fan fiction? The term avant-garde is traditionally used in fine arts to describe an artistic expression which is significantly innovative in technique, subject matter, or application; with the emphasis being on purposeful attempt of new artistic design (Andrae, 1979). While dealing with various social issues, taboos and expressing perceptions on shifting social views; has fan work been a form of avant-garde all along? More and more expression of fan works appears online which could point to their becoming both commonplace and less radical; however, they are rarely declared as so when outside fandom spaces, which is another important issue that could help better understand the various tensions this phenomena exudes.

Coming to this research, initially I did not think fan work would be accepted as a ‘worthy’ subject for an Art thesis, and indeed I admit hearing “but it’s not art” many times since I’ve

7 began. However, I beg to differ. First of all, the practice of an artistic creation which is based on an existing body of work is not a new phenomenon. Especially in the art world we consider how various iconic themes, such as the biblical stories and mythology, were represented in the famous, extremely influential renaissance art movement; or the dada art movement which annihilated the existing order (Mishory, 2000); or pop arts use of copies and multiplicity, and many more! Those artworks and art movements have transcended through countries and societies, as I believe happens these days to fan works, which utilizes iconology of characters and themes from popular media culture to expound them and social mores in various forms. The goal of this research is to better understand the relations between Fan Work and the ever changing social-political climate. This research is focused on fan arts that deal with motifs of queer identity as portrayed by the use of characters from internationally popular (English language) media. In my research, I study fan works that are distributed on the web and focus on those who deal with issues of gender, queer community, and equal rights. This is done through correspondence in socio-political processes and an examination of the connections between Art, fan arts, online domain and socio-political discourse.

Given there are millions of individual fan-works online in a variety of media and genres, and the limitations of the thesis, it was not possible unfortunately to address all representations of fan works. Instead, I chose a specific event with global reach – the Marriage Equality movement in the US during Barak Obama’s presidency (2009-2017). The fan works that are discussed were chosen carefully for building a corpus that is both focused yet wide enough to present the many aspects of the issue: arts, socio-politics, gender, globalization and social identity. This research was done from social construction, interpretive methodology and perspective (Leeds-Hurwitz,

2009). Interpretive perspective’s principle is to study the meanings co-created among

8 participants of oral and written communications, such as fans. Interpretive methodology centers human interaction at the base of scientific examination. In order to breakdown the thesis question, I examine fan works and present their circumstances through socio-political and legal aspects.

In this paper I attempt to answer the question – Is Fan Work a form of Avant-Garde

Contemporary Art? The discussion contains two main parts in which I will examine the selected case studies across different aspects. The first part What, When & Where opens with a cultural study review of the modern conception of ‘fan’, along with parallel perceptions of participatory culture in the UK and the US from late 19th century; the sequential events which led to the formation of contemporary fan participation culture. Further, I expound upon the tension between media culture and print capitalism and where fan work exists in that. This part will illustrate various challenges fan arts and fan artists face, including issues of fair use, anchoring the discussion around several main terms, such as appropriation, adaptation, iconology and trans-textuality. The first part of the discussion closes with a few established theories of sexuality and gender that will be used to decode the corpus later; as I delve into the emergence of queer culture, and tools, within fandom. The second part Art World Perspectives offers at first a contextual review of theoretical approaches in arts and museology, for later discussion of the relation between art and reality/activism. I will than place the practice of Fan Work to be an expression of iconoclash.

The case studies analyzed in this thesis were distributed through a major virtual social platform:

DeviantArt (https://www.deviantart.com), Archive Of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org) and Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com). Fan Work distribution and display will be analyzed through comparative museology aspects to discuss the relation between art and reality/activism

9 through the case studies of two exhibition forms – commercial gallery vs. online platforms. The entire discussion will be tied to an examination of the corpus by a “required” standard of Avant-

Garde Contemporary Art.

There are innumerable expressions of fan works and fan activity online, nevertheless they can be divided into two main categories: ‘complicit’ and ‘resistant’ (Hills, 2003). Complicit fan work does not challenge the right of authorship or the official narrative canon; resistant fan work does precisely that. It’s confronting society to difficult issues and social taboos through heroes who are already culturally worshipped (ibid). Reception (both positive and negative) and growing awareness of fan works, means awareness of another space of creation, another media platform, another social platform, to the commercially established creators and distributors. The following reaction, which varies greatly, is another way of examining the role fan creation plays in today's society, and the art world.

Not surprisingly, Fan Work has been a subject to legal scrutiny, regarding fair use and copy rights of intellectual property. Legal analysis of fan works began with fan fiction and expanded through time to include other aspects of fan generated corpus (Tushnet, 2007). American legal scholar Rebecca Tushnet were referring to fan fiction as “…any kind of written creativity that is based on an identifiable segment of popular culture, such as a television show, and is not produced as ‘professional’ writing” (Black, 2008, p. 10) This definition offers a pragmatic approach to the process of fan creation, which divides between fan and professional literatures.

Having said that, Tushnet’s definition can be used in a broader sense of fan art, as any kind of visual creativity that is based on an identifiable segment of popular culture, for example a television show, that is not produced as professional art.

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Pierre Bourdieu, a French social theorist, studied the nature of society in The Forms of Capital

(2011). There he identified three main forms of capital – an economic, a social and a cultural capital. Economic capital is defined as the possession and command of actual resources with physical monetary worth. Social capital is both actual and potential resources in the possession of an individual or a group, by means of being part of an established network of mutual associations. Cultural capital is the intellectual means by which one is able to reach a higher standing in society (ibid). Cultural capital itself was determined to have three forms – embodied, objectified, and institutionalized (ibid). The first relates to mother tongue, for example, or a dialect. Objectified-cultural capital is a collected artwork, designer clothes and the likes.

Institutionalized cultural capital is similar to social capital; it is the recognized credentials or successful endeavors in a field – such as art. That is, with institutional cultural capital it is not necessarily the artwork itself or even its owner that carries the capital, rather the institutional consensus of its value and worth. Fandom as a community carries great capital for those who partake in it, enabling them to interact in a safe environment in which they can voice and illustrate their ideas. It is highly probable that away from the capitals of fandom, and its community, fan artists lack the ability to approach socially controversial matters head-on and are forced to approach it from a more subdued perspective, or not at all.

As for consensus, Hollywood helped preserve American patriarchal attitudes and mass market them globally (Saler, 2004, pp. 137-138). That is, beyond the preservation of position and opinion within the borders of the United States, as it transferred to all countries in the world who consumed, and continue to consume, the products of American media culture. I suggest that fan work and fandom space embodies an arena on which it is possible to break such conditionings, through the reconstruction of the source material, meaning the original theme or art form. Fan

11 works, while heavily researched as a cultural phenomenon, are essentially a branch of art that grew outside the formal artistic establishment of Fine Arts. It is usually not defined as Art, my research points to this differentiation as a form of indirect censorship, one not created by the state or the art-world, rather one that formed as part of the power system of the Western capitalist market economy.

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Part I: What, When & Where

Applying Bourdieu’s analyzing of art, one must consider thoughtfully the circumstances by which it was declared so (Bourdieu, 1996). In “The Rules of Art” Bourdieu offers a study of

Flaubert and examines the ontogenesis and phylogenies of the art world. According to Bourdieu, the questions one should be asking about art are sociological and historical in nature. What has been accepted or disregarded as art or of artistic value is less meaningful then understanding the why of the circumstances by which it was declared as such (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 285-312).That is, there always have been those who place and determine value on art – Fine Arts establishments, religious establishments, collectors and so on. Keeping this in mind, the limitations of fan-fictions definition came from the legalities of copy rights and intellectual property, rather than the merits of the works themselves (Black, 2008).

Media culture, sometimes called “consumer culture” is heavily connected with Marxist notions of capitalism and consumerism. Marxism originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is a method of socioeconomic analysis that views class relations and social conflict using historical materialism, a materialist reading of historical development. Vulgar Marxism theorists believed in economic determinism, due to a perceived causality between the economic substructure and the ideological superstructure

(family, state, law, religion, etcetera) where the former initiate responses in the later (Andrae,

1979). That is, media culture is sponsored, represented and distributed by economic establishments which hold the ability to establish dominant ideologies through mass media (p.

30).

Henry Jenkins who classified himself as an academic, fandom-participating fan examined the world of media fandom, sought to reframe and respond to preexisting stereotypes of fan-hood 13

(Jenkins, 1992). Fan studies scholars were heavily influenced by the frameworks of Pierre

Bourdieu which I will also utilize. Recently, theorists such as media culture theorist Matt Hills criticized fan studies, stating they were focused on how fandom can be fitted into academic norms, rather than what fandom does culturally (Hills, 2003).

This segment is split into three. I begin by offering a review of present-day fan participation culture in the form of Fan Work, parallel to shifting media reception from the late 18th century

UK until our contemporary globalized reality. Fandoms are extremely fluid, as they are subject to change by introduction of new canonic media, developments of fan-canon as well as fluctuations in fan demographics (Black, 2008). Subsequently, the margins of fan works are ever-changing and redefined in accordance to temporal and localized circumstances (Garon,

2017; McDayter, G., 1999; Ue, T., & Cranfield, J, 2014). The next part of the discussion contextualizes both Jenkins and Hills to Andersons’ print capitalism (2006) and sociopolitical attitudes towards “fannish” activity, alongside selected corpus, to analyze the events which led to the framing of fandom and fan works. The discussion will be concluded in the final subchapter delving into the emergence of queer culture, and tools, within fandom. The discussion will introduce main theories of sexuality and gender that will be used to decode the corpus.

The Framing of Fan & Fandom

‘Fan’ is abbreviated from the word ‘fanatic’. Originally referenced to extreme forms of religious belief and worship and evolved to include non-religious practices, fanaticism and was often used to criticize opposing politics, and later to suggest an afflicting madness (Oxford English

Dictionary). In “Textual Poachers”, published in the 1990s, Henry Jenkins notes that stereotypes of fanaticism “have been attached to the term “fan” from its very inception” and that, at the time, the term ‘fan’ retained “connotations of religious and political zealotry”, which he saw “to be at

14 the heart of many of the representations of fans in contemporary discourse” (Jenkins, 1992, p.

12).Jenkins laid out western notions of fans through mid to late20th century American media representation, and equivalent academic discourse, presenting a frequently stereotypical depictions of fans. Fans were portrayed as “emotionally unstable, socially maladjusted, and dangerously out of sync with reality” by the news; as “isolated, emotionally and socially immature, unable to achieve a proper place for themselves in society, and thus prone to replace grim realities with rich media fantasies” by dramatic films and through comic representations which “offer a more benign but no less socially maladjusted figure” (p. 13). Across the board, fans were depicted to be “drawn inward toward a rich and varied realm of personal fantasy that substitutes for the decisive action they fail to display in their everyday lives”(Jenkins, 1992, p.

14). Jenkins concluded that no matter the specific type of fan–a groupie, an insane killer or religious fanatic –fans remain a subcategorized group whose cultural experience and mentality are incomprehensible to mundane society (p. 16).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘fandom’, the domain of fans, originated in the early 20th century in the United States, through derivation of two pre-existing words -

‘fanatic’ and the suffix ‘dom’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Despite the connotations, academic fan studies have been rejecting the suggestion of ‘fanatic’ as parallel to fandom (Garon, 2017).

Jenkins(1992) concluded ‘Textual” poachers”’ with what he described as a “conception of fandom”, categorized into five main levels of activity, which have remained principal to the definition of fandom: a) Reception: Watching is the beginning of media consumption in fandom. Fans watch media

texts to inspect its meaningful details and understanding of the narrative. The divide between

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reception to enunciation breaks down in fandom as they often occur simultaneously,

reception is transformed into social interactions (p. 284). b) Critical and Interpretive Practices: Fans scrutinize textual detail and reliability of the media

text as well as explore various details and undeveloped potentials, and create strong parallels

between their own lives and the available narrative. This interpretive method exhausts the

available data in creation of a rich meta-text that is a “collaborative enterprise” which

eradicates reader-writer distinctions and avail the media to appropriation. (p. 284). c) Consumer activism: Official fan organizations generate and maintain the interests of regular

viewers and translate them into a broader range of consumer purchases such as spinoffs,

soundtracks, novelizations, sequels, etc. The unofficial fan community offers a base for fans

to express their cultural preferences and desires for alternative developments (pp. 284-285). d) Cultural production: Fans generate genres and develops “alternative institutions of

production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption” typically rejecting profit and

broadening access to its creative works. Appropriate materials from commercial media

culture as the foundation for a contemporary folk culture; there is no division between artists

and consumers in fandom, each fan holds a creative potential (pp. 285-286). e) Fandom functions as an alternative social community: Fandom offers an alternative reality to

mundane society. The familiarity and communal nature of fandom contrasts to the alienation

and frivolity of everyday life; sense of control and identity can be nourished from time spent

within fan culture distanced as it can be from the reality of mundane society (pp. 286-287).

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a general practice doctor, began writing fiction featuring private detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. John Watson, it was quite impossible to predict the phenomena it would come to ignite. Over a century followed the publication of ‘A

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Study in Scarlet’ (1888), the original novel featuring the duo, and one of the first stories to be adapted to the screen, the stories and characters have since seen multiple screen and literary adaptations. Sir Doyle has given credit to the detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe as a source of inspiration, even template, for himself as well as for the detective genre (Knowles, 2007).

Indeed, Sherlock Holmes literature saw unprecedented multinational fan involvement and fascination from the onset. Long before any official adaptations, fans of Holmes’s exploits began writing essays as well as fictional, fan-conceived, plots inspired by the original fiction

(Cranfield, 2014); some wrote their explanations of multiple plot-holes in the original texts, and many fan letters were sent by post (ibid); addressed not to the author at his known address, but to the fictional Sherlock Holmes or John Watson at 221B Baker Street, their equally fictional residence in the novels between 1881-1904. Fans who were partaking in such “fannish” activity were labeled in the media as hysterics (Duffett, 2013, p. 205); historically, hysteria has been mostly perceived as a feminine mental fallacy and has been used in various outlets as means to delay and invalidate women’s rights (ibid) .Thus, its use against this early expression of fandom points to a disregard of worth as well as an attempt of censorship, with prejudice, of presumably inferior texts. Despite such labeling, “fannish” activity continued to evolve and spread.

In ‘Sherlock Holmes, Fan Culture and Fan Letters’ Jonathan Cranfield (2014) acknowledges

18th and 19th century establishment approach to “fannish” behavior was unsympathetic and labeled with notions of fanaticism and effeminacy; it was portrayed as peripheral to mainstream media consumption; and expressions of participation culture through fan-like behavior was more likely be subject to the psychiatry and law enforcement agencies evaluation than cultural criticism (Cranfield, 2014, p. 67). Cranfield emphasizes the complexity off a culture by pointing out that while nowadays participatory culture is commonplace, there is a distinction between

17 forms of behaviors and employs (ibid).In addition, Matt Hills distinguishes between a ‘complicit’ and a ‘resistant’ fan (Hills, 2003, p. 3); a complicit fan partakes in official memorabilia and channels of communication; while a resistant fan risks copyright violation through creation of fan works (Cranfield, 2014, p. 67).In his book Fan Cultures (2003) Hills claims that fan studies have been too invested in how fandom can be fitted into academic norms of “resistant” or

“complicit”, rather than asking what fandom does, culturally (Hills, 2003(. Employing the use of scholar-fan and fan-scholar, Hills addresses critical objectivity and “fannish” complicity also to academic knowledge,as it is not inherently “testable”, and academics are not inherently rational; similarly, fans are not innately immersed in fandom and their knowledge is not automatically

“informal” or “experiential” (Hills, 2003(. Cranfield however believes the main problem facing fan studies lies in understanding the transitional stages between early 19th century scorn and contemporary favor (Cranfield, 2014, p. 67).Focusing on the continuous writing of fan letters to

Sherlock Holmes from the 1890s to contemporary times, Cranfield presents the way those fan letters formed the language of fan participation and interaction to contemporary manifestations of “Sherlockiana”, a term coined to describe memorabilia and non-canonical works of fiction about Sherlock Holmes (ibid).

Also, Cranfield connects the discussion of these fan letters to Michael Saler’s argument against a central opposition between modernity and mysticism at the early 20th century (Cranfield, 2014) and suggests the decline of mystical world views were caused by both “the darkening tenor of the historical moment” (ibid, p.68) and by “the advent of technocratic modes of state and globalized corporate power” (ibid). Saler argues that despite this, attitudes of “positivism and materialism” gave opportunity for “new solace in rearticulating the magical and fantastic traditions of western culture” (ibid), however cultural consumption was not considered a serious

18 occupation and represented as a infantile play, opposed to higher intellectual thought (ibid).

Cranfield employs this concept as he points to a society increasingly involved and innovative cultural consumption and offers that fan letters were, at least in part, an instrument by which fans could explore forms of interactivity and role-play (ibid, p. 69-70, 77).

Print Capitalism & Fan ‘Poaching’

It is an accepted consensus that great social changes and technological advances tend to come hand in hand. Indeed, one of the underlying concepts Anderson uses in his theory is “print capitalism” (2006). Anderson argues that the advances of print technology had major role in nation's development. According to his theory the culture that existed before the national one was built on religion when most available literature was religious; that too, was hardly available to the common man, not to mention woman (Anderson, 2006). In time, the increasingly common print allowed for greater acquaintance with both language itself and subject matters other than religion (Beatty, 1999). Therefore, “print capitalism” created the possibilities for new, national, cultures to grow. Keeping print capitalism in mind, it is not a surprise that once mass printing was available in the twentieth century, the later incarnation of sharing fan-works became the fan magazines, called fanzines, or shortly – “zines” (Triggs, 2010). These were at first popular mostly in the science fiction genre; the zines held anthologies of fan-made essays, art and fiction by different fans and were published periodically.

Fanzine, fan magazine, is a magazine of genre or specific content (literary or musical genres, games, sports and more), it is not funded by a public or commercial body and is usually produced voluntarily by and for fans, a non-profit that only covers the costs of printing and distribution. Fanzine could include articles, prose, art, interviews and relevant news for the specific fandom (Jenkins, 1992, p. 73). Published and distributed throughout the Western world

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since the beginning of the 20th century, long before the age of the internet and social networks,

fanzines played a significant role in the development and distribution of fan culture.

However, fanzine print has also been a controversy; one of the most debatable cases concerned

Lucasfilm, an American film and television production company, best known as the controlling

interest behind the Star Wars franchise, and copyrights. Although fanzines are very clearly non-

profit publications, the subject of copyright is a delicate issue in a capitalistic world. All in all,

the explicit threat of legal action over fan work creators in Lucasfilms campaign against

copyright infringement or defamation was not the last one. In October of 1981, the director of

the Official Star Wars Fan Club Maureen Garrett sent out an “open letters to Star Wars zine

publishers” (Elovaara, 2014) with the approved guidelines from Lucasfilm Ltd that officially

supported Star Wars fanzines, as long as they uphold to the brands ethical stance and do not

contain themes such as pornography, vulgarity, violence and gore. These limitations were

received initially as highly problematic by fan creators, however with time, more and more

stories were published without repercussion, and

the argument died down for a while.

I chose an artwork named ‘On a Stakeout’

(Henderson, 2012), which is a visual fan art

shared on DeviantArt by Diniece Henderson,

under the pseudonym Harseik. ‘DeviantArt’ is a

website that hosts visual images of varied genres.

It uses built-in category structure all artwork is

organized by. That is an important factor

Figure 2: On a Stakeout by Harkseik aka Diniece Henderson. 20 | Digital Art |620x800px 808.8 KB |May 15,2012| Retrieved from deviantart.com/harseik considering type of genre. Registered members have their own automatic webpage which contain an information box that offers their demographic data (as supplied by the user), type of membership and statistics such as number of visitors, comments etcetera (Salah, Salah,… & Van de Poel, 2012). The artwork itself was posted on May 15th, 2012 and is tagged under three different categories – Visual Art, Fan Art and Digital Art, which means it can be found by others browsing DeviantArt under any of these categories. According to their personal portfolio page on the platform (deviantart.com/harseik/about), Harseik lives in the US and was born in 1990, is a professional artist and has been a DeviantArt-member since 2012 with total of 7.8K watchers

(i.e. visitors who ‘watch’ the artist on their feed for updates), 466.3K page views, 534 Deviations

(i.e., a daily feature their work was chosen by DeviantArt team to highlight), 5.6K Comments and 6.1K Favorites (i.e. their work has been saved under a favorite category-list by other users).

The pages automatic statistics show On a Stakeout has been marked as favorite by 2K members, has 199 comments and have been seen by 69K visitors.

The image portrays two figures, DC superheroes Batman (right) and Superman (left), in full regalia at an unspecific urban outdoors, eating and drinking. Both figures are looking to the left;

Superman is kneeling on one knee while eating a burrito, a disposable cup at his foot with a

Burrito Baron logo, styled in the likeness of Burger King. Batman is portrayed sitting with his legs to the front and feet on the ground, filling the better part of the middle of the pictures, one hand on his booted legs and shrouded in shadows, the other holding a disposable drink with a straw to his face, mid-drink. Discarded on the ground are crumbled paper wrapping, an open takeaway box with a single French toast stick, and what appears to be an open condiment.

The mundane activity portrayed in the image is in clear dissonance with both the title and the audiences expectations of superheroes. The title implies a situation of readiness, of upcoming

21 action, in complete contrast the theme itself is hardly dramatic. The heroes, who supposedly should be watching for criminal activity, appear mildly bored as they gaze beyond the view of the picture frame, munching on fast food and loitering. Whether or not one is a fan of the franchise(s), there are clear cultural biases on how heroes and other iconic characters should be portrayed. Placing these heroes in familiar unremarkable situations, such as eating fast food outside, brings them closer to the audience and their everyday reality.

In a similar way, Jenkins expounds fan culture and the ways audience becomes a creator through transformations of segments from film, television, and books. In his book Textual Poachers,

Henry Jenkins applies and adapts Michel De Certeau's (1984) model of "poaching" in which an audience appropriates a text for itself (Jenkins, 1992, pp. 24-28). Arguing that through this so- called poaching and reimagining of popular media culture, fans are in fact an active constructor of an alternative one.

Michel De Certeau (1984) speaks of a culture in which collective society steadily becomes marginalized and “unsigned, unreadable and un-symbolized” in the institutional narrative (p.17) as he reconsiders the professional training that prepares us to reject meanings falling outside our frame of reference and interpretive practice. De Certeau recognized that economic and social barriers block popular access to the means of cultural production, in which textual producers and sanctioned interpreters asserts dominance on the production and distribution of meanings, and limit other, non-sanctioned, voices (De Certeau, 1984, p. 171). He asserts fans are not proprietors of texts and belong to a marginal feeble part of the cultural economy (De Certeau, 1984, p. 176).

Furthermore, he claims that calling activities such as fan writing as ‘poaching’ disregard their merit as authors, as he considers them ‘travelers’ who “move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of

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Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (De Certeau, 1984, p. 174). Thus, he perceives popular reading as a type of cultural bricolage, through which readers break apart the original meanings of the text and selectively choose from its elements to better expound on their own social meanings (De

Certeau, 1984, p. 175). De Certeau disregards the artistic merit in Fan Work, his fan “poacher” is self-serving and culturally unaware individual at best, a cultural blemish at worst.

Jenkins recognized social and legal practices maintain dominance of authorized production over popular readers and textual consumers (Jenkins, 1992, p. 25). He asserts most individuals do not have access to official channels of distribution, leaving their meanings lacking the perceived integrity of the officially produced message, which has the effect of demeaning voices alternative to the establishment. Jenkins claimed that De Certeau offers a contentious rhetoric and argues that authorial authorship and meaning does not have to be compactly disavowed for the recognition of the alternative forms of interpretation and consumption benefits. Nevertheless, De

Certeau provides terms, such as “poachers”, to analyze spaces where meanings are produced outside the official interpretive. Jenkins finds noteworthy about media fans, in relation to de

Certeau’s model, that their vocal activities often draws attention onto their cultural appropriation

(28).

However, this issue is relevant these days too, as portrayed in Harseiks reference, in On a

Stakeout (2012). They used what is referred to as “parody placeholders” for portraying well- known establishment, such as the aforementioned Burrito Baron in place of fast food chain

Burger King, “to avoid (imaginary) lawsuits” (Quoted from the original Deviantart post by

Henderson, 2012). The supposed risk is not completely unreasonable though, as transformative aspects can be debated and may put the artist in risk of fair use litigation. We can see how the

23 enforcement of creative use of characters is limited by the corporations intellectual property claim.

From a wider perspective, the issues of originality and copyrights is discussed in a way in A

Theory of Adaptation, where Hutcheon challenges contemporary capitalistic culture’s disparagement of adaptations verses its value of the “original” (Hutcheon, 2013). Also, the author explores the increasing forms of adaptations in post-modern culture, and describes a creative, interpretive act of appropriation as a typical stage of adaptation; thus, in her words adaptation is not derivative, rather its own “palimpsestic thing” (Hutcheon, 2013, pp. 8-9); that is, the product of adaptation carry traces of the prior incarnation but these traces too, are altered.

She deals with adaptation as “process and product” to examine wide range of its media interpretations; fan-fiction is specifically exempt from this definition. Fan arts are not excluded from this research; however, they are examined as fan adaptations and not adaptations per se, rather referred as a heavily influential and interactive consumption method. However, the books’ second edition introduction acknowledges that there is a need to revisit the research suppositions regarding fan phenomena (Hutcheon, 2013), which is paved by an additional epilogue chapter.

It is important to note that Jenkins (1992) defined and firmly established fandom and fan activities cultural contribution as a form of interactive, participatory, consumption; a notion which prevails across fan and media studies (Jenkins, 1992, pp. VI-VII). This conception firmly separates fans interaction with media segments from ones interactivity with visual culture. My research points to the state's involvement in enforcing intellectual property rights, which gives huge corporations almost total ownership of works of art and icons that carry a symbolic weight in popular culture. As part of this power system, a beginning artist who wishes to use an existing work to create a new work may find himself unable to present his work in the institutionalized

24 spaces (because he actually "steals" intellectual property that he does not own) and therefore is not defined as an artist. In fact, most of them in the first place will not see their work as "art" because they have already internalized the doxa according to which art is property, not only in its physical embodiment but also in its intellectual embodiment. This situation now seems natural, but it was not the case all along. In the past, the use of motifs and elements from previous works was not only an accepted practice , but it was an elementary part of the development and change that occurred in the creative space (Andrae, 1979).The application of market rules to the world of art has created a new situation in which censorship is indirectly imposed by the state's supervision of the economic space and its preservation in capitalist production. Thus, it is easy to see that the cooperation of likeminded individuals, i.e. “fannish” activity, has in fact created change in their outside environment and caused those outside of its boundaries become both aware of it and interact with it as one entity - as a community.

Another interesting perspective is seeing Fandom community as a gift culture, which is bearing intricate “patterns of authority, reciprocity, and exchange” (Hellekson, 2015). The concept was applied by Rachael Sabotini (1999) to speak of the hierarchies within fan culture from Marcel

Mauss's ‘The Gift’ (1990), which expounds on the plain idea that the gifts are not for free, rather come with expectations of reciprocity (Mauss, 1990). Karen Hellekson (2015) claimed fans need to exchange this gift culture to a marketable one; to legitimize fan activity by removing it from the unauthorized to the commercially sanctioned. Moreover, she believes gift culture in fandom is residue of the fanzine era in which fan has had to include disclaimer statements in their fan works, in hopes of avoiding copy-rights disputes. She allows that monetizing fan activity must be done in cooperation with commercial establishments and ventures, in what can be at best a partial solution, as these ventures often censor “fannish” expressions to fit with the establishment

25 social and ethical stance (Hellekson, 2015, p. 126).Additionally, monetizing fan work, applying it with commercially profitable outlets, merely places fan work within the economic capital discourse on the inherent premise that economic capital would grant its value, rather than its embodied merit - such legitimacy does not benefit the fan (Hellekson, 2015, p.127), or the fan work.

Queer, Fandom & Fan Work

This research is focused on fan arts that deals with motifs of queer identity and portrayed by iconography of characters from internationally popular (English language) media. This research examines fan works that are distributed on the web and focus on those who deal with issues of gender, queer community, and equal rights, encompassing issues of sexualities, body, display and space. This is done through correspondence in socio-political processes and an examination of the connections between Art, fan arts, online domain and socio-political discourse. Here are introduced theories of sexuality and gender that will be used to decode the corpus before delving into queer tools and approaches found in fandom, in order to showcase an even more complex sociopolitical arena.

In accordance to the theory of sexuality, one must first separate the concept of sex and sexuality.

The first refers to a biological phenomenon that takes place among all animals, while the second relates to its social structure around the biological phenomenon (Freud, 2002). Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, defined the sex instinct as one of the impulses that motivates humans. In his opinion, this impulse is uncontrollable and universal to all animals. However, this common denominator with the animal contradicts the social and cultural lifespan. Freud argued that, although the urge could be satisfied, it would mean the end of civilization (ibid); this is because cultural society starts at th