The Fan Studies Network

The cinematic release of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) has already garnered speculation, derision and debate equal to its highly controversial source text, E. L. James’ homonymous trilogy. Its alignment with mass media, a predominantly female audience and mainstream cinema make it a concurrently anticipated and abhorred rich contemporary text. Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media thus invites papers which will interrogate this adaptation from a plethora of new perspectives including industry, text and reception analysis.

Focuses may include, but are not limited to:

* Adaptation Studies
* Audience Studies
* Comparative film analyses
* Criticism analyses
* Genre and Formalism
* Fans and Fan-Fiction
* Kink, BDSM and Sexual Politics
* Pornography Studies
* Publicity, promotion and paratexts
* Psychoanalytic textual analysis
* Queer Theory
* Social Networking and the Blogosphere
* Star Studies

Authors are expected to familiarise themselves both with the pre-existing literature on Fifty Shades, and with the submission guidelines available at:

Submission Guidelines

Considering the timeliness of this topic, the deadline for submissions of 6-8k papers accompanied by 250 word abstracts and 150 word bios is April 30th 2015 for publication this year. Submissions should be emailed to assistant editor Sarah Taylor-Harman at Sarah.Harman@brunel.ac.uk.
Inquiries and expressions of interest are also welcomed.

Intensities is a peer reviewed open access online journal. www.http://intensitiescultmedia.com

June 16, 2015 at Middlesex University London

Keynote by Mary Celeste Kearney (University of Notre Dame, USA), author of Girls Make Media

Girls and women are arguably producing more media than ever before. As bloggers, vloggers and “tweeters”, filmmakers, television showrunners, web designers, game developers, and musicians – to name only a few – girls and women are active contributors to contemporary media production cultures. Yet, recent incidents such as Gamergate point to the continuous precarious positioning that girls and women occupy as both amateur and professional media producers within a context shaped by what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2015) has recently called “popular misogyny.” What is at stake for female media producers within this context? How do identities such as gender, race, class, age, sexuality, nationality, and ability shape one’s participation in production cultures? How are gendered neoliberal imperatives to be constantly productive informing who is producing media and what these media texts look like? And in what ways are girls and women mobilizing media production as an activist strategy to challenge sexism, racism, classism and other social inequalities across local, national, and international contexts?

We are seeking papers for a one-day symposium that aims to examine these questions and explore girls’ and women’s production of a wide range of commercial and alternative media texts.

Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Historical analysis of girls and women as media producers

• The production and circulation of feminist and activist media texts

• Gendered labour in media industries

• Methodological approaches to studying production cultures

• Relationship between gender, media production, and neoliberal entrepreneurship

• The politics of media production training programs

• Female media producers across global media networks

• Participation in digital media cultures

This one-day symposium, featuring a keynote lecture by Mary Celeste Kearney (University of Notre Dame, USA), will be held at Middlesex University in London UK on June 16, 2015. It will serve as an opportunity for discussion and networking for feminist media scholars focusing on production cultures prior to the Console-ing Passions Conference in Dublin from June 18 – 20. This event is organized as part of Middlesex University’s FemGenSex Research Network and the Media Department’s Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster.

Please submit abstracts of 250-words and a 50-word bio by March 15, 2015 to Jessalynn Keller (j.keller@mdx.ac.uk), Feona Attwood (f.attwood@mdx.ac.uk), and Mariam Kauser (m.kauser@mdx.ac.uk).

We are pleased to invite submissions for the second issue of SERIES, a new international open access journal on TV serial narratives. The main focus of the journal is to promote a global discussion forum and an interdisciplinary exchange among scholars engaged in research into TV serial narratives. SERIES encourages methodological innovation in academic research, providing new contributions for a better understanding of the narrative, technological, economic, social and cultural impact of TV serial dramas. Articles should deal with television series, web series and/or telenovelas. According to that we will welcome submissions on every topic related to TV serial narratives for our second issue. 

In addition, a relevant issue at the moment seems to be the size of serial production that now more than ever have been so diverse and manifold. New broadcasters/producers and new forms of fruition are outlining a scenario in which the size of the series have become particularly important, also in determining the performance of the product in terms of ratings/advertising/sponsors/product placement, etc. Papers devoted to the study of this topic will be specially welcomed.

If you are interested in this call for papers, please send your full manuscript before June 30, 2015. The deadline for the editorial work (open and peer review process, editing and improvement of articles if needed, etc.) is September 30, 2015. Expected publication date of the issue: November 2015. 

For more information about the journal, please visit the website: http://seriesjournal.org