No abstract

This article explores the politics of digital memory and traceability, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and on queer theories of performance and ephemerality. Its primary example is the Organization for Transformative Works, a successful advocacy group for creative media fans whose main project has been an online fan fiction archive. I am concerned both with this public face and with the activities that fans would prefer to keep out of the official record. For scholars of subcultural artistic and cultural production, the mixed blessings of conservation and legitimacy are necessary considerations for the archiving and meaning-making work of cultural theory. Paying attention to the technological and social specificities that contextualize fandom as a digital archive culture, I trace contradictions and contestations around what fannish and scholarly archivable content is and should be: what’s trivial, what’s significant, what legally belongs to whom, and what deserves to be preserved.

We were invited to this issue of the Journal of e-Media Studies because we gave something a name. We are two participants in a group of early-career queer, feminist, and ethnic studies scholars of media, literature, and culture who are interested in digital scholarship, who kept meeting at conferences and wondering why the critical frameworks and politicized histories of our activist inquiry were so rarely part of the conversations we were having about scholarly technology. The series of academic conference events that led us to converge as a collective have by now been hashed and rehashed many times: there was an idea at THATCamp SoCal in response to anxiety at MLA 2011; then a small but productive panel at ASA (American Studies Association) 2011; some blog posts on HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology

In response to a rapidly changing scene of intellectual property in digital media, activist fans have mobilized to develop a communal, nonprofit group to provide fans with an "archive of their own", protecting fan works from deletion by server hosts who believe those works to be in breach of copyright. In 2008, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) incorporated as a nonprofit, and the Archive of Our Own went live in 2009. I am a paid-up member of the OTW—and publishing in the journal it sponsors, after being part of the editorial team for the first five issues—because I believe in the artistic and cultural importance of fan works and I want them to be preserved. But I also believe we must look critically at the meaning-making projects that are encompassed within the OTW's goal of legitimatizing and preserving fan works for the future.