The Fan Studies Network

Special issue of Celebrity Studies

Audiences for Celebrity

Edited by Martin Barker, Su Holmes and Sarah Ralph

The study of audiences for celebrities and stars has developed spasmodically.  Apart from important early studies by Stacey (1994) and Kuhn (2002), and from a different angle Gamson (1994) Barbas (2001) and Allen and Mendick (2012), and a variety of marketing-derived studies, there has been only a scatter of works concretely addressing how distinct audiences engage with celebrities, and how those engagements become meaningful within their broader lives.  For this Special Issue we hope to gather essays embodying a range of kinds of research in both audience and reception studies traditions.  We invite proposals for papers to appear in a special issue of Celebrity Studies exploring how audiences engage (positively or negatively) with celebrity figures and culture. Proposals may address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Studies of audiences for particular stars/ celebrities (from a range of different media forms, including film, TV, popular music, literature, sport, internet, social media, theatre, opera etc…)
• Studies of online fan cultures, or users of a particular media form
• Historical/ archival studies of audience engagements with celebrities/ stars
• Discussions of methodological issues in the study of celebrity/ star audiences
• Studies of celebrity/ star controversies or spectacular moments and audience responses

Please submit an extended abstract of 500 words (outlining the topic, methods, audience or reception materials used, and contribution to Celebrity Studies and Audience Studies) to susan.holmes@uea.ac.uk, by Friday 1^st November. Please also include a brief biographical note of 4-5 lines.  We plan to complete evaluation of abstracts by the end of November.  Those accepted will be asked to submit completed essays, to a maximum of 8,000 words, by the end of June 2014.

Engaging the Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture

Full name / name of organization:

Elyce Rae Helford (senior editor), Mick Howard, Sarah Gray-Panesi, Shiloh Carroll / Middle Tennessee State University

Contact email:

ewfcollection@gmail.com

The past thirty years have offered a growing and changing body of scholarship on images of fantastic women in American popular culture.  Collections from Marleen Barr’s Future Females (1981) and Future Females: The Next Generation (2000) to Elyce Rae Helford’s Fantasy Girls: Gender and the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television (2000) and Sherrie Inness’s Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (2004) have offered multifaceted commentary on ways in which contemporary media culture posits and positions “empowered” women in speculative fictions.  Engaging the Woman Fantastic in Contemporary Media Culture takes part in this tradition and brings it to the present day with emphasis on texts from the 1990s to the present and media from young adult fiction to social networks.  In particular, this edited scholarly collection, to be published in 2014 by Cambridge Scholars Press, engages with female protagonists, antagonists, and characters that challenge such simple binaries in popular literature, television, comics, videogames, and other new media.  As a whole, the volume will examine how images of fantastic women address prevailing ideas of gender, race, sexuality, class, nation, and other facets of identity in contemporary American culture.

We welcome proposals on all aspects of the “Woman Fantastic” within an imaginative fictional context and originating or retaining special media resonance from the mid-1990s to the present. Submissions should be grounded in a particular critical or theoretical perspective and center on a single text and/or character. We especially seek manuscripts within the following categories:

• Media: social networks and internet culture (e.g. Tumblr’s Eschergirls, Twitter’s Feminist Hulk, webcomics)

• Approaches: postcolonial, queer, disability, fandom

• Focus: images of women of color and/or queer women in any medium other than film

Note: We do not seek submissions on film, non-American texts, or DC comics.  Also, because we are most interested in publishing studies of texts that have not been written about extensively elsewhere (e.g. the Harry Potter novels), be sure to offer a unique focus or new angle if you write on academically popular texts.

To submit, send a two-page proposal with working bibliography and brief vita (as a single .doc or .rtf attachment) to ewfcollection@gmail.com by November 1, 2013.  Complete, polished manuscripts are due by January 30, 2014.  Queries are welcome.  Acceptance will be handled on a rolling basis.

EWFflyerCFP

Call for contributors to Playing Harry Potter:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has served as the inspiration for numerous performative acts created by and for fans of the books. While the Warner Bros. films and Universal theme parks were produced to capitalize on the books’ commercial success, HP fans have responded to the narrative in a grassroots, often non-commercial fashion—initiating performances that contribute to the ever-growing collection of Potter fan-generated content, or “fanon.” As the makers of A Very Potter Musical declare, these performances are “solely for the personal, non-commercial enjoyment of ourselves and other Harry Potter fans.” Nonetheless, they have successfully reached mass audiences and galvanized a fan base comprised largely of amateurs and persons who might otherwise be uninvolved in the arts. Moreover, fan-based performance extends beyond the production of original plays such as AVPM and Potted Potter to include a wide range of artistic representations from puppetry to Role-Play and Cosplay. This anthology of collected essays is the first to offer an examination of both the motivations and effects of Potter fan-performance and a critical analysis of the relationship these performances have to “official” or “sanctioned” Potter representations such as the Warner Bros. films, Pottermore, and the Universal theme park. Of particular interest is the investigation of the meaning (both in terms of definition and significance) of “performance” in the HP context and its wider cultural implications.

Editors seek chapter contributors for this book proposal. Topics may include but are not restricted to: Cosplay/Role-Play/Life-Play, performativity in internet forums, the Muggle Quidditch sports movement, gender bending, slash fiction, racial representation/cross racial-performance, trans-nationalism, radio plays, and shows like Potted Potter and A Very Potter Musical.

Submissions for consideration should include a 250 word abstract of the chapter and a CV. Send both to Lisa Brenner at PlayingHarryPotter@gmail.com. Deadline October 4, 2013.

CFP: Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, special issue on Science Fiction and Videogames

For over half a century—from the spaceship duels of Spacewar! and the
attacking waves of the Space Invaders, through to the explorations of
the Metroid series and the complex environments of the Bioshock
games—electronic gaming has made extensive use of science fictional
themes and settings. Likewise, science fiction, in books like Ender’s
Game, films like The Last Starfighter, and TV shows like Defiance, has
often explored tropes of videogaming within its created worlds. Both
regularly, even obsessively, address questions of identity,
embodiment, and representation, as well as the constructions and
constraints of culture; both are also constituted in the complex and
often fraught relations between fan groups and society.

Foundation (http://www.sf-foundation.org) seeks papers for a special issue on science fiction and
electronic gaming that will delineate and explore zones of concern
shared by these two rapidly developing bodies of criticism and theory.
What might their intersections reveal about the gaps, conflicts, and
kinships of our present cultural moment? How does the history of
science fiction criticism speak to game studies, and vice versa? How
might the modes of play we develop in electronic realms translate to
our methods of critical reading or viewing? What SF works, canonical
or otherwise, might be read differently when seen as anticipating or
responding to digital gaming?

All topics and methodologies are welcome, potentially including (but
not limited to) genre theory, fandom, constructions and
representations of cultural identities, physical and intellectual
disability, platform studies and media archaeology, software and
critical code studies, print culture, and readings of individual
titles or series.

Send submissions of up to 8,000 words (including endnotes) by 15 April
2014 to journaleditor@sf-foundation.org, attaching the file as
electronic text in either .rtf or .doc format. For questions about
formatting, see the Foundation style guide at sf-foundation.org;
direct all other inquiries to Andrew Ferguson at af3pj@virginia.edu.