It’s not all about the music:online fan communities and collecting Hard Rock Café pins

Previous studies of music fan culture have largely centered on the diverse range of subcultures devoted to particular genres, groups, and stars. Where studies have moved beyond the actual music and examined the fashion, concerts, and collecting ephemera such as vinyl records and posters, they have tended to remain closely allied to notions of subcultural distinction, emphasizing hierarchies of taste. This paper shifts the focus in music fan studies beyond the appreciation of the music and discusses the popular fan practice of collecting souvenir pins produced and sold by the Hard Rock Café (HRC) within a framework of fan tourism. Traveling to and collecting unique pins from locations across the globe creates a fan dialogue that centers on tourism and the collecting practices associated with souvenir consumption. Collectors engage in practices such as blogging, travel writing, and administration that become important indicators of their particular expression of fandom: pin collecting. Membership requires both time and money; recording visits around the world and collecting unique pins from every café builds fans' cultural capital. This indicates an internationalization of popular fandom, with the Internet acting as a connective virtual space between local and national, personal and public physical space. The study of HRC pin collecting and its fan community suggests that HRC enthusiasts are not so because they enjoy rock music or follow any particular artist but due to the physical ephemera that they collect and the places and spaces they visit

How a professionals slash writer disrupts readers' expectations

Professionals fandom is a fertile ground for AU stories. At face value, Rhiannon's The Larton Chronicles is a pleasant, cozy AU that bears only a token resemblance to the show that inspired it. On closer examination, though, it disrupts a number of the themes that thread through The Professionals, including those of sexuality, race, and class

Abusing text in the Roman and contemporary worlds

In this comparison of portraits of authorial anxiety, I focus on contemporary attitudes to fan fiction and on discussions of authors in Imperial Rome (notably Galen and Martial) to consider the assumptions of textuality that frame imagined textual abuse. Revealed are parallel discourses for different concerns—for the reader as a potentially ill-educated consumer and the text as an object in the ancient world; in the contemporary world, for the author's personal violation and the text as an agent within readerly experience. I discuss how fan fiction's lack of commercial publication is used to distinguish it from other contemporary literature within this framework. Fan fiction's noncommercial publication can thus be appreciated as a marginalizing act in itself.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Organization for Transformative Works via http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016.067

Editorial Policies, "Public Domain" and Acafandom

Full text also available at http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/275/224Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.International audienceThe article analyzes the several aspects related to the relationship between editorial policies of periodicals and fan privacy, as evolution is taking place in the field of acafandom. It is stated that, fans need to consider their privacy when they publish their work on the Internet, as it is being increasingly used for fan studies

"So oft to the movies they've been": British fan writing and female audiences in the silent cinema

This article aims to address the ways in which working-class and lower-middle- class British women used silent-era fan magazines as a space for articulating their role within the development of a female film culture. The article focuses on letter pages that formed a key site for female contribution to British fan magazines across the silent era. In contributing to these pages, women found a space to debate and discuss the appeal and significance of particular female representations within film culture. Using detailed archival research tracing the content of a specific magazine, Picturegoer, across a 15-year period (1913–28), the article will show the dominance of particular types of female representation in both fan and "official" magazine discourses, analyzing the ways in which British women used these images to work through national tensions regarding modern femininity and traditional ideas of female propriety and restraint

Sherlock (Holmes) in Japanese (fan) works

I explore the history of Japanese writing centered on Sherlock Holmes as a means of interrogating the 2014 BBC Sherlock pastiche John and Sherlock Casebook 1: Jon, zenchi renmei e iku (The stark naked league), written by Japanese Sherlockian Kitahara Naohiko for mainstream publication by the publishing house Hayakawa shobō. I argue that exploration of the Japanese (fan) cultural contexts of Kitahara's book begins to reveal the limits of the Anglo-American-centered framework through which fan studies scholars explore fan/producer relationships

The application of industrialised building system in residential project

Industrialised Building System (IBS) is an alternative of construction that can change many aspects in building construction. The Industrialised Building System (IBS) is a construction system that is built using prefabricated components and is systematically done using machine, formworks and other forms of mechanical equipment. Before this, the construction industry in Malaysia had faced so many problems related to the increasing of using foreign workers, waste of building materials, uncontrolled quality of building materials, unsafe construction site and delay of construction period. This study is done in order to identify the number of Industrialised Building System (IBS) used in residential project, to analyze the types of Industrialised Building System (IBS) used in residential project, and to analyze the method to expand the use of Industrialised Building System (IBS) in residential project. The study is done by distributing the questionnaire by postage delivery and conducting an interview. Through detailed reading and distributed questionnaire, the number of Industrialised Building System used in residential project is identified. To conclude, the Industrialised Building System is still not widely used in the residential project. Most of the housing companies are using precast-concrete framing, panel and box system in residential project. Based on the results obtained, to reduce the Industrialised Building System (IBS) component price rate is the most preferable solution to this matter

Trans-cult-ural Fandom: Desire, Technology and the Transformation of Fan Subjectivities in the Japanese Female Fandom of Hong Kong Stars

This essay examines the ways in which affective desire and new media technologies were mobilized by Japanese female fans of Hong Kong films and stars to produce a fan subjectivity that was at once cult and transcultural. The origins of this fandom, which flourished from around 1985 through the 1990s, lay in structural affinities of the Japanese and Hong Kong entertainment industries of the 1980s, as well as the ways in which popular stars of both places were expected to perform their stardom. In particular, a shared valuing of stars' relatability and approachability translated, for Japanese fans, into a seemingly paradoxical sense of intimacy with the stars of another culture, an intimacy that was fostered and heightened by women's pursuit of Hong Kong media outside the official distribution channels of the Japanese media industry. I examine the knowledges required by women to seek out favorite stars' films on VHS and VCD, as well as the sites of such consumption, which combined in the production of what I tentatively term a trans-cult-ural fan subjectivity that was at once cultish in its intensity and desire for ownership, as well as transcultural in its performance by fans

Why they won't save us: political dispositions in the conflicts of superheroes

Comic book superheroes tend to be conservative and their opponents progressive. Here I explore the reasons for heroic conservatism, review recent disruptions to the trend, and consider what superhuman politics can tell us about our own transhuman and science fictional conditions

Playing [with] multiple roles: Readers, authors, and characters in Who Is Blaise Zabini?

Fans who produce fan works in genres such as fiction, music, and music video take on dual roles in the process, as readers of the original canon and as creators of their own products. These roles -and more- are creatively explored in the Parselmouths\u27 wizard rock composition Who Is Blaise Zabini? . Like many works of fan fiction, the Parselmouths\u27 songs move beyond a reader\u27s ordinary role, taking on an authorial role to generate new characters and events in the Harry Potter universe. What makes this particular work unusual is that at the same time that they are adopting the roles of authors, and even of participants, the Parselmouths also restrict their own authorial and participatory power, claiming that the Slytherin characters they portray could not perceive their classmate Blaise Zabini until J. K. Rowling provided a complete description of him. To untangle their multiple roles and to recognize the creativity exercised by the Parselmouths in collapsing the boundaries among them, it will be helpful to turn to a theory of audience response that delineates specific roles and that specifies the limitations and the powers inherent in them