The Fan Studies Network

Screen Studies and the School of Culture and Communication, The Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne

hannifeast@gmail.com
November 29-30, 2016
https://feastingonhannibal.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/call-for-papers/

Keynote Speaker: Associate Professor Jane Stadler, The University of Queensland

Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter is one of contemporary popular culture’s most prominent and recognisable models of monstrosity. Initially conceived in the 1981-2006 novel series by Thomas Harris, Hannibal exists at the centre of a sprawling franchise that includes the critically acclaimed film, The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), and most recently Bryan Fuller’s television series Hannibal (2013-2015). The diverse texts that constitute the Hannibal franchise demonstrate the fertile potential of the Hannibal mythology to extend and develop across multiple media, and the complexity of Hannibal himself as a boundary-defying figure of modern monstrosity and the senses. At the centre of Hannibal’s monstrosity is a breakdown of the boundaries between high and low art, the mythic and the everyday, and refinement and savagery. Accordingly, critical interest in the Hannibal franchise has focused on Hannibal’s embodiment of the boundary transgressions central to scholarly understandings of monstrosity.

Critical analyses of the books and films have been both profound and widespread across various disciplines. More recently, Fuller’s Hannibal has not only redefined what came before, but has inspired, extended and renewed interest in this seminal figure. The “Feasting on Hannibal” conference aims to push the boundaries of previous conceptualizations of the Hannibal series, while reflecting on how the television show has reframed the culture of Hannibal. This conference looks to the future of the franchise as a continually developing and mutating mythology, welcoming papers that examine Hannibal across any of his multiple incarnations, but especially considering how Hannibal mythology has been reformulated and extended since Fuller’s television series.

Screen Studies and the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne invite you to submit abstract proposals for an interdisciplinary conference feast that turns the tables on Hannibal Lecter, offering Hannibal up for a meal of multiple courses and scholarly cuisines.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Hannibal’s influence on screen culture
Hannibal as embodiment of contemporary monstrosity
Hannibal and the sensorium
Hannibal as mythology
Aesthetics and affect in Hannibal
Hannibal as a franchise property
Hannibal, seriality and transmedia storytelling
Self-reflexivity and intertextuality
Hannibal and adaptation
Hannibal and genre
High-concept television
High art and elite tastes
The aesthetics of violence
Hannibal and fandom
The culture of food in Hannibal
Cannibalism, food and body horror
Representations of animality and the post human in Hannibal
Criminal monstrosity and moral panic
Depictions of psychology and emotions
The development of gender and sexuality in the Hannibal mythology
The music of Hannibal and Hannibal’s music

Submit queries and abstracts of no more than 300 words length, as well as a short bio, before 15th of May to hannifeast@gmail.com.

Organised by: Dr Jessica Balanzategui, Naja Later, and Tara Lomax, The University of Melbourne

Call for Papers:

FAN STUDIES

2016 Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference

Thursday-Sunday, October 6-9, 2016

Chicago, IL

Hilton Chicago/Rosemont O’Hare

Deadline: April 30, 2016

Submissions.mpcaaca.org

Topics can include, but are not limited to fan fiction, multi-media fan production, fan communities, fandom of individual media texts, sports fandom, or the future of fandom. Case studies are also welcome.

Please upload 250 word abstract proposals on any aspect of Fan Studies to the Fan Studies area,http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/.

More information about the conference can be found at http://www.mpcaaca.org/

Please note the availability of graduate student travel grants: http://mpcaaca.org/conference/travel-grants/.

Please include name, affiliation, and e-mail address with the 250 word abstract. Also, please indicate in your submission whether your presentation will require an LCD Projector and/or Audio hookup.

Any questions? Please email Katie Wilson at KateMarieWilson@gmail.com

Fan Fiction and Ancient Scribal Cultures
EABS annual meeting, Leuven, Belgium, July 17-20

Chairs

Sonja Ammann, Humboldt University Berlin (sonja.ammann@hu-berlin.de).

Mette Bundvad, University of Copenhagen (mbu@teol.ku.dk).

Frauke Uhlenbruch (f.uhlenbruch@gmail.com).

Programme

This unit brings together scholars and practitioners to investigate scribal culture in biblical and para-biblical literatures in comparison and contrast with the practice of writing fan fiction.

Writers of fan fiction are well-versed in specific canons, for example a book or TV series. They engage with their canons in depth and create literature either set in the same fictional world as their canonical material or featuring the same characters. The material produced by fans, known as fan fiction, is a way of engaging with perceived canonical material that is intuitive and emotional, and can also be subversive. This research unit investigates possible intersections of fans’ ways of creating material based on a canon and (post-) biblical interpreters’ or redactors’ ways of compiling commentary or supplementary material on biblical canons in antiquity. The unit invites constructive and critical engagement with discontinuities (as well as continuities). For example, fan fiction is a contemporary phenomenon whose increased visibility is due to the Internet; put more generally, production and distribution is based on infrastructure different from ancient writings; therefore one may also expect different power relations and institutional contexts.

Fan fiction can be compared to the practices of groups of interpreters who have impacted the Bible and biblical interpretation in significant ways. This comparison can raise and answer questions about group identity, power, subversion, and impact of derivative works upon the canon. Fan fiction as a heuristic model allows us to study historical responses to antique corpora of texts, expressions of identities couched in derivative works, subversive manipulations of a canonical status quo, and emotional reactions to a canonical work.

Call for Papers 2016

This research group uses fan fiction as an interpretative model to study ancient texts, especially biblical and parabiblical texts from the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, the Christian apocrypha, and Rabbinic literature.
At the 2016 conference in Leuven, we invite papers that use expressions of identity in contemporary fan fiction to investigate questions related to authorship and identity in ancient texts. Possible topics include, for example, strategies of constructing or concealing authorship (pseudepigraphy/anonymity), or scholarly assumptions about authors/creators based on the drift of a canon-related work. We also welcome papers that explore expressions of gendered identities, and how gendered expectations affect practices of writing and interpretation. We encourage participants to make their contributions in an interdisciplinary environment and we welcome papers concerned with methodology of the study of fan fiction, fans, and scribal culture.

Click here (https://eabs.net/ocs/index.php/annualmeeting/2016/login) to submit an abstract.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Superhero Identities Symposium
Venue: Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) – Melbourne, Australia – 8-9 December 2016

Keynote Speaker: Professor Henry Jenkins – University of Southern California

It is hard to imagine a time when superheroes have been more pervasive in popular culture. As one of our most beloved folkloric traditions these costume-clad adventurers have become a means to negotiate and articulate identities in response to fictional heroes. Superhero identities range from those that symbolise a nation, to web communities that use cosplay to challenge gender roles, and the people of a city coming together under the banner of a caped crusader. This symposium will examine the many intersections between superheroes and identity. From big screen heroes to lesser-known comic book vigilantes and real-life costumed heroes, the symposium will include papers that consider superheroes across all eras and media platforms

We are inviting submissions for individual research papers of 20 minutes as well as pre-formed panels. Proposal topics might include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Super-Activism
One of the central tenets of the superhero story is the transition of unassuming civilians into costume-clad heroes. This narrative is not confined to the comic book page as the people of San Francisco demonstrated when they came together to realise the adventures of Batkid. Proposals are invited that consider how superheroes have become icons of activism and community engagement.

National and Regional Identities
Comic books are often considered an American form, and the medium’s most popular character, the superhero, did much to affirm that link with dozens of star-spangled heroes created during the industry’s Golden Age. However, the superhero has been reimagined in a range of contexts to respond to local cultures, politics, and traditions. Papers that consider how superheroes engage with national and regional identities are welcome.

Secret Identities
The masquerade and imaginative possibilities of superheroes, coupled with their high concept settings, have allowed these characters to engage with issues and interests that were often difficult to tackle in more “grounded” stories. Papers that consider how superheroes address topics such as gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are invited.

Audiences, Fans, and Superheroes
Whether it is t-shirts adorned with a familiar logo or convention cosplay and fan fiction, superheroes compel participation. We encourage papers that examine the range of this engagement from casual movie audiences to avid consumers.

Supervillains
The supervillain is often understood as the hero’s dark double. This symposium welcomes papers that consider the identities of the supervillains, and their relationship to the above topics.

The Superhero Identities symposium is organised by the Superheroes & Me research team – Angela Ndalianis (University of Melbourne), Liam Burke (Swinburne University of Technology), Elizabeth MacFarlane (University of Melbourne), Wendy Haslem (University of Melbourne), and Ian Gordon (National University of Singapore) – and supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Proposals of 250-300 words for individual presentations or full panels, as well as any queries, should be sent to wburke@swin.edu.au by June 24, 2016, along with a 150-word bio.

Call for Papers: Journal of Fandom Studies, Queerbaiting special issue.

Fans use the term ‘queerbaiting’ to account for a television tactic whereby producers deliberately insert homoerotic subtext between characters in order to capture a queer viewership, yet never actualise this subtext on screen. It is near exclusively deemed by fans as an exploitative tactic that is harmful to queer viewers; one that teases queer representations, then shuts down opportunities for validation with ‘no homo’ jokes in text and denial of the existence of any subtext in commentary. It has thus attained decidedly negative connotations in its usage by fans and a degree of cultural currency in the popular sphere, the hashtag #Queerbaiting an increasingly popular device on Twitter for shaming such tactics, for example. Cult series such as Supernatural and Sherlock are among the most frequently named for queerbaiting their audiences, which given the scholarly interest by fan scholars in these texts, raises important questions for our field. Recently, investigation has begun into some of the questions posed by queerbaiting, such as the activist agenda behind the term’s coinage (Nordin, 2015), its statement on fan-producer interactions (Collier, 2015), textual readings of certain texts that queerbait (Fathallah, 2015), and of how this relatively new term bodes for understandings of particular well-canvassed fan practices, such as slash (Brennan, 2016).

The recent interest by scholars in the various issues associated with queerbaiting make a collection of essays that situate the tactic in terms of the fan studies field timely. Further, a survey of such issues is important in light of the impassioned calls from many fans for such tactics to cease, and for producers to take account of the harm caused by queerbaiting. A key argument being that in ‘baiting’ their audiences, then denying actual representations, queer viewers face invalidation of their experiences (Sheehan, 2015). This is not to discount alternate readings on the practice, such as of the potential queer readings that ‘queerbaiting’ in fact make possible, even plausible (Brennan, 2016).

This special edition of Journal of Fandom Studies aims to take account of why queerbaiting as a concept has gained the appeal it has, and why now. Not only what exactly it means to queerbait, but also the relationship between this term and the current media landscape, in which queer representations are supposedly possible in mainstream texts, yet still denied. Therefore, the issue seeks to take stock of the current state of media representations accused of queerbaiting and of the fannish culture that surrounds the development of this term. Importantly, the edition aims to consider what criticism of certain tactics might mean for longstanding debates within the field, among them: media effects, fan/producer power relations, active/passive consumption, fan production (slash, for example), and identity, to name just a few. As such, submissions are encouraged from across disciplines, with the aim to better understand what queerbaiting means to fans; what harm, if any, it causes them; and how we are to proceed with the study of fandoms that, some argue, are harmful.

Submission Details

Submissions of particular interest are not limited to but may address:

Etymology of the term
What constitutes queerbaiting?
Queerbaiting as fan activism
Good/bad representations of sexuality
Mainstreaming queer representation
Queerbaiting vs homoeroticism
Campaigns to boycott series that queerbait
Queerbaiting vs queer reading
Hoyay, fan service, subtext, ‘no homo’ jokes, and other related terms
Textual readings of particular series that queerbait, such as Supernatural, Sherlock, Merlin, Rizzoli & Isles, Teen Wolf
#Queerbaiting on Twitter
Fan-producer dynamics
Methodologies for studying queerbaiting
Queerbaiting on film (The Avengers, Victor Frankenstein, for example)
Queerbaiting in advertising
Queerbaiting and slash/femslash, ‘correcting’ queerbaiting
Queerbaiting as invalidation of identity
Cast and producer responses to accusations of queerbaiting
Celebrity queerbaiting (James Franco, Nick Jonas, etc.)
Capitalising on queerbaiting (the ‘pink dollar’)
This special edition of Journal of Fandom Studies will be edited by Dr Joseph Brennan.

Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short biographical note to joseph.brennan@sydney.edu.au by June 1, 2016. Completed articles of 6000–9000 words will be due November 1, 2016.

Editorial Information

Edited by: Joseph Brennan (joseph.brennan@sydney.edu.au)