Fandom and Feminism section of Cinema Journal

I just received my contributor’s copy of Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009). In it is an In Focus section edited by my Transformative Works and Cultures coeditor, Kristina Busse, about fandom and feminism, and I’ve contributed an essay about fan gift culture. Many of the other contributors are people I work with at TWC.

The In Focus section is available for download as PDF here. The contents are as follows:

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production, edited by Kristina Busse

• Introduction, by Kristina Busse
• “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness,” by Francesca Coppa
• “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” by Karen Hellekson
• “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” by Abigail De Kosnik
• “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergece,” by Julie Levin Russo
• “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” by Alexis Lothian

The cover image illustrates our In Focus: it’s a screenshot from Lim’s 2007 fanvid, “Us,” which you may view at MediaCommons (curated by Kristina): “Us” – a multivid by Lim. This metavid has rightfully gotten a lot of attention, and it still brings tears to my eyes: there is so much of me (the fan) and what I believe in there. The artist was profiled at NPR at “Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses.” This vid is a wonderful example of how fandom is sometimes all about us and our practices (the “den of thieves” of the song), and not (really) (always) about the source material.

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