Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera

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.

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

“…There is an ever-expanding archive of fan texts, created, managed and distributed by fans themselves, bypassing formal avenues, authorities and controls [76]. They have embraced participatory forms of information organisation such as folksonomies, and created their own, purpose-built classification systems.…”

From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World: Possible Pathways and Ways of Having Done Fandom

“…For instance, Alexis Lothian (2013) has gone so far as to explicitly label the phenomenon subcultural fandom, whilst Karen Hellekson (2009Hellekson ( , 2015 has similarly emphasized the gift economy shared by media fans, and its on-going detachment from "imposed" commerciality.…”

“…Instead, the binary is one of fan community and culture ("[b]eing in fandom") versus thoroughgoing fan industrial co-optation. Nonetheless, there is a sense of fan culture as differentiated that underlies the work of Coppa (2014), Hellekson (2015), and Lothian (2013), where being "in fandom can change a person, who in taking on the identity of 'fan' may also come to take on additional identities-that of a writer, blogger, film-maker, organizer, activist, etc.-that impact her sense of self and the way she engages the world" (Coppa, 2014, p. 78).…”

“They All Lived Happily Ever After. Obviously.”: Realism and Utopia in Game of Thrones-Based Alternate Universe Fairy Tale Fan Fiction

“…Thus, despite their perhaps unrealistic utopian urge, some fairy tale AUs based on Game of Thrones may have more in common with Halberstam's concept of queer time than expected, because they detail all the potential paths to good lives that Game of Thrones, quality TV tropes, and the constraints of the dominant mass media suppress as frivolous, illegible, and impossible. A series of case studies will be examined, based on "The Princess and the Frog", "Cinderella", "Beauty and the Beast", and "Bluebeard", published on the "Archive of Our Own" non-profit fan fiction repository [79][80][81]. Although these stories represent only a drop of the flood of available fan works taken from only one central archive, they still begin to suggest the range of thought experiments possible when the Game of Thrones storyworld collides with the fairy tale, and the way in which fan spaces set all these visions of the better good life into dialogue.…”