Transformative Works and Cultures, special issues: Transformative Works and Fan Activism, No. 10 (June 15, 2012) Editorial Henry Jenkins & Sangita Shresthova, Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism Theory Melissa M. Brough & Sangita Shresthova, Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation Henry Jenkins, "Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, & Chris Tokuhama, Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members' narratives Ashley Hinck, Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance Andreas Jungherr, The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns Matt Yockey, Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons Praxis Sun Jung, Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom Bethan Jones, Being of service: "X-Files" fans and social engagement Marcus Schulzke, Fan action and political participation on "The Colbert Report" Alex Leavitt, Andrea Horbinski, Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public for the Japanese dôjin community Tanya R. Cochran, "Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses Lili Wilkinson, Nerdfighters, "Paper Towns," and heterotopia Cheuk Yin Li, The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong Tom Phillips, Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization Symposium Jonathan Gray, Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the Wisconsin protests Aswin Punathambekar, On the ordinariness of participatory culture Stephen Duncombe, Imagining No-place Lucy Bennett, Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature Ritesh Mehta, Flash activism: How a Bollywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a murder trial Review Stacey Marie Lantagne, "Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intellectual property protection," by Aaron Schwabach Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. TWC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Download date: March 15, 2017. For citation, please refer to the most recent version of articles at TWC. Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012) Editorial Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States [0.1] Abstract—Editorial for Transformative Works and Cultures, No. 10, special issue, "Transformative Works and Fan Activism." [0.2] Keywords—Dream Act; Invisible Children; Kony 2012; Participatory politics, Participatory culture Jenkins, Henry, and Sangita Shresthova. 2012. "Up, Up, and Away! The Power and Potential of Fan Activism." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0435. [0.3] [Fandom] is built on psychological mechanisms that are relevant to political involvement: these are concerned with the realm of fantasy and imagination on the one hand, and with emotional processes on the other… The remaining question then becomes whether and how politics can borrow from the elements of popular culture that produce these intense audience investments, so that citizenship becomes entertaining. —Liesbeth van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen [0.4] 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 experience 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 alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism. —Steven Duncombe, "Imagining No­Place" 1. Introduction [1.1] In 2011, American political leaders and activists were surprisingly concerned with an 80­plus­year­old popular culture icon: Superman. When presidential candidate Rick Perry was asked by a 9­year­old child during a campaign stop which superhero he would want to be, the tough­talking Texan chose the man from Krypton, because "Superman came to save the United States!" (Well 2011). At almost that same moment, conservative commentators were up in arms because in an alternative universe DC comics story, Superman denounced his American citizenship to embrace a more global perspective: "I'm tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy. 'Truth, Justice, and the American way!'—It's not enough any more." Right­ wing rage was expressed by one FoxNews.com reader: "This is absolutely sickening. We are now down to destroying all American Icons. How are we going to survive as a Nation?" (Appelo 2011). Such responses suggest a widespread recognition that popular mythologies may provide the frames through which the public makes sense of its national identity. [1.2] Meanwhile, immigrant rights activists were questioning when Superman ever became an American citizen or whether he even possessed a green card, given that he entered the country without permission and, we must presume, without documentation, a refugee from a society in turmoil who has sought to hide his origins and identity from outside scrutiny ever since. [1.3] Hari Kondabolu, a South Asian comedian, recorded a video entitled "Superman as Immigrant Rights Activist," distributed through Colorlines (http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/10/superman_as_immigrant_rights_activist.html), asking why no one ever tried to deport Superman for "stealing jobs" and suggesting that other immigrants might wear glasses, like Clark Kent does, to mask their identities. Photographer Dulce Pinzon (http://www.dulcepinzon.com/en_projects_superhero.htm) produced a powerful set of images depicting a range of (mostly Marvel) superheroes performing the jobs often done by undocumented workers. As Thomas Andrae (1987; see also Engle 1987) has noted, at the time of his origins in the late Depression era, Superman adopted an explicitly political stance ("the champion of the oppressed") rather than the more vaguely civic orientation of subsequent decades. As Matt Yockey demonstrates in regard to Wonder Woman in this issue, superheroes have long functioned as mythological figures or rhetorical devices for debates around identity politics. Even DC Comics has described Superman as "the ultimate immigrant" (Perry 2011). [1.4] Arely Zimmerman (forthcoming), a postdoc with the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (part of USC's Civic Paths Project), interviewed 25 undocumented youth activists involved in the campaign to pass the Dream Act. She was struck by how often superheroes cropped up in her exchanges. One respondent described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like "finding other X­Men." Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself "proud" and "undocumented" had parallels to the experience of Spider­Man, who had removed his mask on national television during Marvel's Civil Wars story line (note 1). A graphic created for an online recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth volunteers might aspire to become. [1.5] On the one hand, we might read these various deployments of the superheroes as illustrating the trends Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) describes: groups promoting social change are tapping the affective and imaginative properties of popular culture to inspire a more intense connection with their supporters. In this issue, Jonathan Gray shows similar appropriations of images from Star Wars and a range of other popular media franchises during labor rights protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Gray argues that such images (which have also been widely associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement) proliferate because popular culture, especially blockbuster franchises, constitutes a common reference point (shared between fans and more casual consumers) within an otherwise diverse and fragmented coalition of protestors and observers. Gray stresses the morale and community­building work performed through the remixing of popular culture for those gathered in an icy Wisconsin winter to express their support for collective bargaining. Zimmerman (forthcoming) also suggests that the Dream activists' use of pop culture references might be understood as part of a larger strategy to signal their assimilation into American culture. Given how much contemporary speech of all kinds is full of snarky pop culture references, it is not surprising that such references are also reshaping our political rhetoric, especially as campaigns seek to speak to young people who have famously felt excluded from traditional campaigns and have often been turned off by inside­the­ beltway language. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to Washington! [1.6] Yet as the epigraph from Duncombe (this issue) suggests, such popular culture