News/Research

Gail De Kosnik Co-Edits Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures Published

15 Mar, 2019

Gail De Kosnik Co-Edits Special Issue of Transformative Works and Cultures Published

"Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color," a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, co-edited by Abigail De Kosnik and andré carrington, has hit the stands!

From the introduction:

This special issue arises from a rising tide of feeling, expressed not only by the two issue editors, but also by the editorial board of Transformative Works and Cultures and by numerous established and emerging participants in fan studies, that fan studies as a field must include more scholars of color and more scholarship on race and ethnicity. That fan studies was founded, and has been dominated up to this point, by white scholars, is indisputable. The same can be said of nearly all fields of academic study founded in US, UK, and European universities, and efforts have been undertaken from within multiple disciplines to undo the racist logics that undergird them.

[...]

We now turn to the current issue, which, we think and hope, significantly furthers and deepens fan studies' engagement with critical race studies, ethnic studies, transnational studies, and scholarship on the Global South and the non-Western world. We designated the theme of this issue to be "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color" because we wished to invite contributions from scholars of color and scholars outside the United States who work on fandom, and also from scholars of all ethnicities and nationalities who engage with fandoms of characters of color and/or fans of color. We and the journal editors sounded the call through our professional and social media networks and posted the call for papers on numerous sites, and we (gratefully) received many more submissions than we anticipated.

TWC is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived; articles about media studies; and articles about the fan community.

TWC publishes papers in a variety of critical approaches, including feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, audience theory, reader-response theory, literary criticism, film studies, and posthumanism. Authors test the limits of the genre of academic writing.

Read the issue here