The Fan Studies Network

From Devin Magee:
This is a call for participants in a Fan Studies panel at PCA 2017. I’d like to put together a diverse group of fan scholars who are active in various fandoms, and particularly those who create or consume transformative works.
In the Fan Studies panel at PCA 2016, participants discussed myriad reasons for reading and writing fanfiction, as well as problems within fanfiction and fandom as a whole. Examples were given of authors not properly researching race, stereotypes about gay men, exclusion of female characters in order to give priority to men– all problems stemming because they stymie the efforts of those who turn to transformative works to do what so much canon does not: reflect the diversity of experience of those creating it, reading it, or engaging with it in other ways.
That diversity of experience includes disability (both mental and physical), and as is the case in many spaces where multiple axes of oppression intersect, fandom tends to ignore or misrepresent disabled characters. In this panel, I’d like to address why that is and how it can be remedied. Specifically, I’d like to ask the questions, “where does disability fit into fan space?”, “how can able-bodied writers address disability in their works?”, “how do transformative works address canonical disability?”, and “do disabled fans interact with fandom differently than able-bodied fans? If so, how?”. I’d like to focus on physical disability, though perspectives on mental disability are also valuable and will be included.
I am looking for 3-5 other scholars to join this panel. Anybody interested should send an abstract of no more than 250 words to Devin Magee (dmnoble94@gmail.com) by September 30, 2016.

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