Call for proposals: DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History... more Call for proposals: DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History. Deadline for 250 word proposals October 1, acceptance by 10/15. MSS due December 30, Transparent P2P review December 30-January 15, Revisions 1/15-Feb 28.
Though women have been printing alongside men since the invention of the printing press, their st... more Though women have been printing alongside men since the invention of the printing press, their stories have been comparatively neglected in the scholarship. In many studies, women remain nameless. John W. Moore provided the following cautionary fable regarding women in an early German print shop in his 1886 collection Historical Notes on Printers and
As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can final... more As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.
As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can final... more As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural 's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.
This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and argues for its recu... more This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and argues for its recuperative potential in feminist literary history. Digital enumerative bibliography uses bibliographical structures within a relational database that allows researchers to track more relevant metadata such as geographical location of subject matter, language, and time period. Whereas traditional enumerative bibliographies use a hierarchy of textual data, a relational database creates a nexus that facilitates new kinds of research queries. As an example, we offer our digital project the Women in Book History Bibliography and use its 1,550 citations as a dataset to trace what is women’s book history. We then advocate for digital enumerative bibliography as a form of feminist recovery efforts that recovers not only primary texts but scholarship about them.
Empirical bibliography is “an effort to understand the manner in which a book was c... more Empirical bibliography is “an effort to understand the manner in which a book was constructed through immediate physical experience (including the systematic and repeatable process of testing and verification based on historical methodology)” (Samuelson and Morrow 2015, 86). As a pedagogical tool, it has been adopted at multiple institutions as a method of teaching book history—where “book” is implicitly understood to be a printed codex created for public consumption. However, programs that look at writing and manuscript work have not utilized similar methods, or if they have, on a much reduced scale; for example, courses in manuscripts and paleography are generally focused on learning skills to read a text rather than to produce one. I would argue that at least part of the discrepancy between the material study of print and manuscript is because of gender: Even as print culture was becoming the norm of consumption, women continued to write and circulate their work in manuscript form well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While scholarship is increasingly willing to tackle the material aspect of bibliography and print and how they can inform these concepts, the questions of gender and of manuscripts are ones that remain to be fully scrutinized. By adding empirical bibliography to our toolbox, feminist scholars can revise our narratives in a different way in a different location, and push beyond the familiar conceptions of the “book” to consider alternate narratives of book history.
Despite its vocal support for social justice, both fandom (and acafandom) as a whole continues to... more Despite its vocal support for social justice, both fandom (and acafandom) as a whole continues to ignore the way race and privilege work within slash communities, especially how the vast bulk of fic and art remains devoted to prioritizing white cis-bodies. Fans often defend this “default,” pointing to the lack of nuanced, fleshed out non-white characters in texts that attract fandom attention. However, as media texts become more diverse, this argument has begun to be disproven. An example of this that has been enacted most recently and vividly has been in the MCU fandom, focusing around the character of Sam Wilson. Introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Antman), Sam Wilson is Steve Roger’s close friend and ally, and has caused a significant ripple in the competing “order” of Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky pairings. While Sam’s character and background spoke directly to all the things fandom has claimed it wanted—diversity, acknowledgements of PTSD and trauma, even literalizing social justice through a brief mention of Sam’s thwarted political run—he is nonetheless continually erased or attacked (most infamously when a Big Name Fan in Steve/Tony declared that he “had” to be part of HYDRA) specifically because he is black, enacting narrative violence on the black body that is an echo of the literal violence shown to black characters both onscreen, repeatedly, and in real life.
From the release of its first trailer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens received a racist backlash in... more From the release of its first trailer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens received a racist backlash in response to the character of Finn, a black Stormtrooper turned hero. Nonetheless, after the film’s debut, slash fans across the Internet joined to make the Finn/Poe and Finn/Poe/Rey relationships (known as ‘ships) among the most popular in both art and fiction, in what seemed to be a welcome sign of fandom’s evolution from the usual orgy of white cis-bodies. However, by the time TFA was available for legal download, the Kylo/Hux ‘ship had overtaken the others significantly, despite their lack of screentime and actual lines, and the fact that they were “actual space Nazis” and “evil space boyfriends.” This essay will explore the intersections of racism and misogyny in TFA fanfiction and discuss why these most problematic ‘ships have become the most popular, and consider how the mainstreaming of the Empire in the popular imagination is a form of political whitelash.
Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has ... more Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has never been easier to access this subculture of writers and writing. However, fan fiction in print has likewise never been so accessible, as a slew of recent popular novels proudly proclaim their fannish origins and make claims such as "More Than 2 Million Reads Online—FIRST TIME IN PRINT!" Further, traditional fannish mores insist that fan work should never be done for profit, and yet numerous print works adapted from fan fiction have become best sellers. I would like to problematize how we consider form and content in both creation and reception, how the popular value of work waxes and wanes in relation to its fan fiction status. In other words, how can we read fan fiction as part of a continuum of historical publication practices by women, and problematize our hierarchies of value between print and digital?
The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public wor... more The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public work taking place in a private setting. This private space emphasised the traditional hierarchies of political and legal order: Women’s work that took place within the printing house thus fell into the traditional role of household labours. This erasure of labour is one that foregrounds the erasure of women’s writing from history; women who worked in essence as publishers, as printers and booksellers, are very clearly present in the historical records but invisible in our narratives of book history. How did this erasure happen, and why is their presence, and work, overlooked? If we consider the language of space in theory and reread Moxon’s Mechanickal Exercises closely, we see the ways in which the ideas of space itself can be implicitly gendered, and how this might shape our idea of the printing house.
Coker, Cait, and Candace Benefiel. “Fifty Shades of Twilight: Transforming Genre and Publishing i... more Coker, Cait, and Candace Benefiel. “Fifty Shades of Twilight: Transforming Genre and Publishing in Fan Contexts.” Fan Phenomena: The Twilight Saga. Ed. Laurena Aker. University of Chicago: Intellect Press, 2016. pp. 152-161.
Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary cr... more Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary critique and history. This intellectual lacuna exists primarily because of the dual problems of genre and gender; much of what we will consider as fan writing and fan fiction in this essay originates from science fiction and fantasy media properties from the 1960s onwards, and much of it is written by women, especially young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.
This paper is part of a long-term project on fannish literary history; as such I perhaps have mor... more This paper is part of a long-term project on fannish literary history; as such I perhaps have more questions in mind than answers. These include: What does it mean that we have a canon of Fan Studies scholarship, but not of fan writers or fan texts? Why are the male scholars of Fan Studies canonized at the expense of the women scholars, especially when the primary sources at hand are predominantly authored by women? Is “fanfiction” a genre or a medium? Does it make sense to talk about old fen, new fen, truefen, theories of reading and writing, socioeconomics, narratives of performativity, low and high and middlebrow culture when it comes to how fans publish over time? Is a literary history of fandom even possible, and if it is, what is it?
ABSTRACT Star Trek fandom is well known as the cradle of slash fiction, particularly Kirk/Spock (... more ABSTRACT Star Trek fandom is well known as the cradle of slash fiction, particularly Kirk/Spock (K/S) or fiction focusing on the romance between Kirk and Spock. The 2009 film that rebooted the franchise likewise rebooted its fandom, creating several factions in response to the newly canonical Spock/Uhura romance. This article overviews the history of Star Trek slash and investigates how the introduction of Reboot pairings in fandom takes on historic resonances, rewrites historic characterizations and introduces new genres and tropes into the fan writing of this franchise.
Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. 8.4 (Winter 2011): http://slayageo... more Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. 8.4 (Winter 2011): http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage32/Coker.pdf
In: Sexual Rhetoric in the Whedonverse. Ed. Erin B. Waggoner. McFarland & Company, Inc. 2010: 226... more In: Sexual Rhetoric in the Whedonverse. Ed. Erin B. Waggoner. McFarland & Company, Inc. 2010: 226-238.
Call for proposals: DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History... more Call for proposals: DH+BH: An Interdisciplinary Collection on Digital Humanities and Book History. Deadline for 250 word proposals October 1, acceptance by 10/15. MSS due December 30, Transparent P2P review December 30-January 15, Revisions 1/15-Feb 28.
Though women have been printing alongside men since the invention of the printing press, their st... more Though women have been printing alongside men since the invention of the printing press, their stories have been comparatively neglected in the scholarship. In many studies, women remain nameless. John W. Moore provided the following cautionary fable regarding women in an early German print shop in his 1886 collection Historical Notes on Printers and
As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can final... more As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.
As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can final... more As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural 's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.
This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and argues for its recu... more This article articulates a digital adaptation of enumerative bibliography and argues for its recuperative potential in feminist literary history. Digital enumerative bibliography uses bibliographical structures within a relational database that allows researchers to track more relevant metadata such as geographical location of subject matter, language, and time period. Whereas traditional enumerative bibliographies use a hierarchy of textual data, a relational database creates a nexus that facilitates new kinds of research queries. As an example, we offer our digital project the Women in Book History Bibliography and use its 1,550 citations as a dataset to trace what is women’s book history. We then advocate for digital enumerative bibliography as a form of feminist recovery efforts that recovers not only primary texts but scholarship about them.
Empirical bibliography is “an effort to understand the manner in which a book was c... more Empirical bibliography is “an effort to understand the manner in which a book was constructed through immediate physical experience (including the systematic and repeatable process of testing and verification based on historical methodology)” (Samuelson and Morrow 2015, 86). As a pedagogical tool, it has been adopted at multiple institutions as a method of teaching book history—where “book” is implicitly understood to be a printed codex created for public consumption. However, programs that look at writing and manuscript work have not utilized similar methods, or if they have, on a much reduced scale; for example, courses in manuscripts and paleography are generally focused on learning skills to read a text rather than to produce one. I would argue that at least part of the discrepancy between the material study of print and manuscript is because of gender: Even as print culture was becoming the norm of consumption, women continued to write and circulate their work in manuscript form well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While scholarship is increasingly willing to tackle the material aspect of bibliography and print and how they can inform these concepts, the questions of gender and of manuscripts are ones that remain to be fully scrutinized. By adding empirical bibliography to our toolbox, feminist scholars can revise our narratives in a different way in a different location, and push beyond the familiar conceptions of the “book” to consider alternate narratives of book history.
Despite its vocal support for social justice, both fandom (and acafandom) as a whole continues to... more Despite its vocal support for social justice, both fandom (and acafandom) as a whole continues to ignore the way race and privilege work within slash communities, especially how the vast bulk of fic and art remains devoted to prioritizing white cis-bodies. Fans often defend this “default,” pointing to the lack of nuanced, fleshed out non-white characters in texts that attract fandom attention. However, as media texts become more diverse, this argument has begun to be disproven. An example of this that has been enacted most recently and vividly has been in the MCU fandom, focusing around the character of Sam Wilson. Introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Antman), Sam Wilson is Steve Roger’s close friend and ally, and has caused a significant ripple in the competing “order” of Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky pairings. While Sam’s character and background spoke directly to all the things fandom has claimed it wanted—diversity, acknowledgements of PTSD and trauma, even literalizing social justice through a brief mention of Sam’s thwarted political run—he is nonetheless continually erased or attacked (most infamously when a Big Name Fan in Steve/Tony declared that he “had” to be part of HYDRA) specifically because he is black, enacting narrative violence on the black body that is an echo of the literal violence shown to black characters both onscreen, repeatedly, and in real life.
From the release of its first trailer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens received a racist backlash in... more From the release of its first trailer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens received a racist backlash in response to the character of Finn, a black Stormtrooper turned hero. Nonetheless, after the film’s debut, slash fans across the Internet joined to make the Finn/Poe and Finn/Poe/Rey relationships (known as ‘ships) among the most popular in both art and fiction, in what seemed to be a welcome sign of fandom’s evolution from the usual orgy of white cis-bodies. However, by the time TFA was available for legal download, the Kylo/Hux ‘ship had overtaken the others significantly, despite their lack of screentime and actual lines, and the fact that they were “actual space Nazis” and “evil space boyfriends.” This essay will explore the intersections of racism and misogyny in TFA fanfiction and discuss why these most problematic ‘ships have become the most popular, and consider how the mainstreaming of the Empire in the popular imagination is a form of political whitelash.
Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has ... more Contemporary fan fiction is overwhelmingly digital in both publication and dissemination; it has never been easier to access this subculture of writers and writing. However, fan fiction in print has likewise never been so accessible, as a slew of recent popular novels proudly proclaim their fannish origins and make claims such as "More Than 2 Million Reads Online—FIRST TIME IN PRINT!" Further, traditional fannish mores insist that fan work should never be done for profit, and yet numerous print works adapted from fan fiction have become best sellers. I would like to problematize how we consider form and content in both creation and reception, how the popular value of work waxes and wanes in relation to its fan fiction status. In other words, how can we read fan fiction as part of a continuum of historical publication practices by women, and problematize our hierarchies of value between print and digital?
The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public wor... more The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public work taking place in a private setting. This private space emphasised the traditional hierarchies of political and legal order: Women’s work that took place within the printing house thus fell into the traditional role of household labours. This erasure of labour is one that foregrounds the erasure of women’s writing from history; women who worked in essence as publishers, as printers and booksellers, are very clearly present in the historical records but invisible in our narratives of book history. How did this erasure happen, and why is their presence, and work, overlooked? If we consider the language of space in theory and reread Moxon’s Mechanickal Exercises closely, we see the ways in which the ideas of space itself can be implicitly gendered, and how this might shape our idea of the printing house.
Coker, Cait, and Candace Benefiel. “Fifty Shades of Twilight: Transforming Genre and Publishing i... more Coker, Cait, and Candace Benefiel. “Fifty Shades of Twilight: Transforming Genre and Publishing in Fan Contexts.” Fan Phenomena: The Twilight Saga. Ed. Laurena Aker. University of Chicago: Intellect Press, 2016. pp. 152-161.
Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary cr... more Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary critique and history. This intellectual lacuna exists primarily because of the dual problems of genre and gender; much of what we will consider as fan writing and fan fiction in this essay originates from science fiction and fantasy media properties from the 1960s onwards, and much of it is written by women, especially young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.
This paper is part of a long-term project on fannish literary history; as such I perhaps have mor... more This paper is part of a long-term project on fannish literary history; as such I perhaps have more questions in mind than answers. These include: What does it mean that we have a canon of Fan Studies scholarship, but not of fan writers or fan texts? Why are the male scholars of Fan Studies canonized at the expense of the women scholars, especially when the primary sources at hand are predominantly authored by women? Is “fanfiction” a genre or a medium? Does it make sense to talk about old fen, new fen, truefen, theories of reading and writing, socioeconomics, narratives of performativity, low and high and middlebrow culture when it comes to how fans publish over time? Is a literary history of fandom even possible, and if it is, what is it?
ABSTRACT Star Trek fandom is well known as the cradle of slash fiction, particularly Kirk/Spock (... more ABSTRACT Star Trek fandom is well known as the cradle of slash fiction, particularly Kirk/Spock (K/S) or fiction focusing on the romance between Kirk and Spock. The 2009 film that rebooted the franchise likewise rebooted its fandom, creating several factions in response to the newly canonical Spock/Uhura romance. This article overviews the history of Star Trek slash and investigates how the introduction of Reboot pairings in fandom takes on historic resonances, rewrites historic characterizations and introduces new genres and tropes into the fan writing of this franchise.
Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. 8.4 (Winter 2011): http://slayageo... more Slayage: The Online Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. 8.4 (Winter 2011): http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage32/Coker.pdf
In: Sexual Rhetoric in the Whedonverse. Ed. Erin B. Waggoner. McFarland & Company, Inc. 2010: 226... more In: Sexual Rhetoric in the Whedonverse. Ed. Erin B. Waggoner. McFarland & Company, Inc. 2010: 226-238.
Discussions of gender in book history have largely been confined to recovering women’s writing an... more Discussions of gender in book history have largely been confined to recovering women’s writing and women’s reading. This has created several narratives that have governed our analysis: one being the persecuted woman writer, who is either openly operating in the public sphere to public stigma and condemnation, or in the private sphere and expertly navigating alternate forms of publication through manuscript; another being the passive and persecuted woman reader, whose appetite for novels especially in the long eighteenth century managed to champion an evolving form and genre that continues to be attacked today; the last being the active member of the trades either as printer, binder, or hawker, an exceptional role viewed as a blip in history writ large that is quickly subsumed by male industrialists. Despite a clear trajectory of greater involvement and activity by and for women in the trade, they nonetheless often remain shadowy figures in academic scholarship, popular criticism, and artistic acknowledgement. What I hope to consider here, then, is not just how we might recover the narratives of women in the book trades, but how we have arrived at some of these narratives ourselves.
Sammelband has three main focuses: theoretical approaches, gathering materials and resources, and... more Sammelband has three main focuses: theoretical approaches, gathering materials and resources, and practical exercises for the classroom. The first discusses the motivations for and benefits of dedicating classroom space to empirical bibliography, or learning through replicating historical processes (Samuelson and Morrow, 2015; paywalled). The second will help build a teaching library by listing reliable dealers of materials and anticipated costs. We organize these posts around building working “kits” for classrooms, workshops, and personal use. The last category provides practical advice for how to implement this in undergraduate and graduate classrooms in history, literature, and library sciences, although many of these exercises could be used at the secondary and primary levels with modifications. We link to open-access resources and provide our own, as well as a supplementary space to discuss methods and effectiveness on social media.
We want to provide a hub where work on women's writing and labor finds a voice. Often women's voi... more We want to provide a hub where work on women's writing and labor finds a voice. Often women's voices and labor are marginalized in major book history companions and readers, but this is not for a lack of scholarship on the subject. We hope to ameliorate a lack of attention by providing a venue for the clear interest scholars and readers have in women's lives and work. Updated regularly; submissions welcome.
In the long Eighteenth Century, women emerged in the official records as full-fledged members (a... more In the long Eighteenth Century, women emerged in the official records as full-fledged members (apprentices and journeymen) of the Stationers’ Company and took part in its rigorous guild system, and then disappeared. Numerous reasons have been put forth as to what caused this shift in the recognition and perception of gendered workers, which I would like to reconsider by looking more closely at seventeenth-century English printing houses as sites of labor, production, materials, and costs. Materializing gender in print takes three forms: the narrative of how men saw women in printing houses (largely symbolically with only little inroads in acknowledging very real labor), the narrative of how women saw themselves (and men), and the narrative of the masculine default (in which if men see women they still don’t see them as women, just as extensions of men).
Exhibit catalog for the September 2024-May 2025 exhibit at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at ... more Exhibit catalog for the September 2024-May 2025 exhibit at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The exhibit celebrates the 75th anniversary of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen—the poetry collection that won the first Pulitzer Prize for literature by a Black author—and explores the rich history of Black literature’s emergence into the mainstream.
As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can final... more As the long-running series Supernatural (2005-2020) comes to a close, fans and scholars can finally consider the text as a closed canon that offers new possibilities for analysis. While previous volumes from throughout its run have examined the series through the lenses of genre, theology, and philosophy, this collection will analyze the show through the thus-far underused lenses of fan, gender, sexuality, and porn studies. Supernatural 's use and interpretations of sexualities, queerness, consumption of pornography and human bodies (sometimes literally) speaks to both horror tropes and to cultural anxieties. The longevity of the show also allows it to act as a litmus test for changing mores in sex and gender representation. The goal of this edited volume will be to analyze these topics across the breadth of the show and its related texts, including licensed novels and comics and fan fiction and meta.
Uploads
Papers by Cait Coker
this “default,” pointing to the lack of nuanced, fleshed out non-white characters in texts that attract fandom attention. However, as media texts become more diverse, this argument has begun to be disproven. An example of this that has been enacted most recently and vividly has been in the MCU fandom, focusing around the character of Sam Wilson. Introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Antman), Sam Wilson is Steve Roger’s close friend and ally, and has caused a significant ripple in the competing “order” of Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky pairings. While Sam’s character and background spoke directly to all the things fandom has claimed it wanted—diversity, acknowledgements of PTSD and trauma, even literalizing social justice through a brief mention of Sam’s thwarted political run—he is nonetheless continually erased or attacked (most infamously when a Big Name Fan in Steve/Tony declared that he “had” to be part of HYDRA) specifically because he is black, enacting narrative violence on the black body that is an echo of the literal violence shown to black characters both onscreen, repeatedly, and in real life.
young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a
point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope
to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.
this “default,” pointing to the lack of nuanced, fleshed out non-white characters in texts that attract fandom attention. However, as media texts become more diverse, this argument has begun to be disproven. An example of this that has been enacted most recently and vividly has been in the MCU fandom, focusing around the character of Sam Wilson. Introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and appearing in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Antman), Sam Wilson is Steve Roger’s close friend and ally, and has caused a significant ripple in the competing “order” of Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky pairings. While Sam’s character and background spoke directly to all the things fandom has claimed it wanted—diversity, acknowledgements of PTSD and trauma, even literalizing social justice through a brief mention of Sam’s thwarted political run—he is nonetheless continually erased or attacked (most infamously when a Big Name Fan in Steve/Tony declared that he “had” to be part of HYDRA) specifically because he is black, enacting narrative violence on the black body that is an echo of the literal violence shown to black characters both onscreen, repeatedly, and in real life.
young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a
point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope
to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.