Archive for May, 2024

CFP: Girl Audiences in the ‘Girlscape’

May 10, 2024

Michele Paule (Oxford Brookes) and Sarah Godfrey (UEA) are excited to announce this call for papers for a themed edition of the Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 

CFP: Girl Audiences in the ‘Girlscape’

The term ‘girlscape’ was coined by Tomiko Yoda to describe a ‘mediatic milieu, disseminated via a variety of media channels, linking feminine bodies, affects, objects, and environment’ in which the identificatory figure of the girl is placed ‘at the centre of a consumer culture conceived of as both utopian and egalitarian’ (2017, 173). Yoda develops the theory in terms of Japanese tourism campaigns drawing on wider cultural discourses that position girls as enjoying new freedoms and influence in post-70s Japan. We borrow the term and extend it to consider ways in which girls are increasingly positioned as consuming, agentic, highly visible subjects within contemporary media, and also as ideal prod-users whose online practices sustain platform activity and enjoin the consumption of others. The ‘girlscape’, while encompassing global media elements, will manifest differently in and across different local and national contexts.

If, as Michelle Santiago Cortes (2020) claims, ‘teenage girls rule the internet right now’ they must also navigate the complex conditions and restrictions of this new visibility (Banet-Weiser 2018). Girls’ participatory audience practices draw attention to ways in which algorithmic measures are serving up ever-more tailored and intimate menus for their consumption, while their own activities are consciously shaped through the ‘datafication of affect’ as they work to accrue followers (Bishop 2019; Zhao 2021). The prod-usage of girl audiences and fans enriches the transmedia landscape as they appropriate and remix content that may resist, negotiate with or entirely reproduce hegemonic girlhoods (Hall 1973). At the same time as girl fans’ labour is increasingly important to media platform activity and profitability in economies of attention, girls’ activities as fans and online participants continue to attract derision and hostility (Wilson 2018). The ‘girlscape’, of course, is not limited to digital realms; legacy media including film, young adult (YA) fiction, television, music, and merchandising ‘paratexts’ exist and combine as a part of the proliferation of popular girl-focused media. 

The consumer address to girls of ‘can-do’ Western media feminisms, and the datafication of girl audience economies have been extensively critiqued for their reproduction of middle-class, white, figures and their relegation, exoticisation or elision of non-normative girlhoods. While some corporations have mobilised feminist and inclusive politics in featuring, for example, Black girls, Islamic girls, queer girls and disabled girls in their media output, such ‘naive integration’ (Heiss 2020) has been critiqued for its commodification of feminist politics, its ultimate reinscription of normate bodies, and its reproduction of cultural focus on girls’ appearance. Minoritised girls nonetheless shape their own visibility via alternative media practices such as traditional ‘zines (Reynolds 2020), Twitter signifyin’ (Florini 2014) and counter-narrative podcasts (Greene 2021). This complex and rapidly mutating milieu begs for more empirical research into how girl audiences/readers/users are engaging with the contemporary ‘girlscape’. We therefore invite papers based on original research into any aspect of girl audiences. The following themes are suggestions, but are not restrictive:

  • Girl audiences of specific texts in defined ‘girlscapes’
  • Integrated approaches analysing texts and their production alongside their reception by girls
  • Methodologies for researching girls’ engagements with/in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ participatory media practices/prod-usage
  • The political economies of audiences in the ‘girlscape’
  • The emotional and digital labour of girls/ girl fans online
  • Girls subverting/queering/evading the ‘girlscape’
  • Global/national/local ‘girlscapes’ and their audiences
  • Transmedia engagements in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ engagements with popular feminisms in the ‘girlscape’
  • Girls’ navigation of streaming platforms
  • Girl prod-users on algorithms/ privacy
  • Girls as content creators imagining audiences

Submission Guidelines:

Authors interested in contributing to this special edition are invited to submit original research articles on the Section’s theme. We are happy to receive a range of contributions including creative responses to the theme, although we give priority to essays on actual audience and reception research. We welcome:

  • Empirical audience/reception studies 
  • Essays investigating industry practices/political economies 
  • State-of-the field reviews
  • Reviews of key books/essays
  • Interviews
  • Translations

Manuscripts should adhere to Participations submission guidelines. All submissions will undergo peer-review to ensure academic rigour and relevance. Please note we will adopt Participations’ model of cross-reviewing by others contributing to the Themed Section, and their principle of Open Refereeing, under which the names of authors and referees are known to each other.

Timeline

  • Submission of proposals/abstracts: 1st June 2024
  • Submission of drafts: 1st October 2024 (3 months)
  • Peer Review feedback: 1st December 2024 (2 months)
  • Revised Submissions: 1st February (2 months)
  • From Revised Submissions to confirmation and submission to journal: 1st April (2 months)
  • Publication: May 2025

References

Banet-Weiser, S. 2018. Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.

Bishop, S. 2019. Managing visibility on YouTube through algorithmic gossip. New Media and Society, 21 (1112), 2589-2606.

Cortés, Michelle Santiago. 2020. Charli D’Amelio now has more followers than anyone on TikTok. Refinery 29, 27 March. Available at: https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/03/9615235/charli-damelio-most-followers-on-tiktok

Florini, Sarah. 2014. ‘ Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on “Black Twitter”. ’, Television & New Media, 15:3, pp. 223–37.

Greene, D. T. 2021. (W) rites of passage: Black girls’ journaling and podcast script writing as counternarratives. Voices from the Middle, 28(4), 38-42.

Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding/decoding. In (eds) S. Hall, S., D. Hobson, D., A. Lowe and P. Willis, 2003. Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79. Routledge Hall,,pp. 128-138.

Heiss, S., 2011. Locating the bodies of women and disability in definitions of beauty: An analysis of Dove’s campaign for real beauty. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(1).

Jackson, S., 2021. “A very basic view of feminism”: feminist girls and meanings of (celebrity) feminism. Feminist Media Studies, 21(7), pp.1072-1090.

Reynolds, C., 2020. “My zines, so far, aren’t as political as other works I’ve produced”: Communicative Capitalism Among Queer Feminist Zinesters. Communication, Culture & Critique, 13(1), pp.92-110.

Subramanian, S., 2021. Bahujan girls’ anti-caste activism on TikTok. Feminist Media Studies, 21(1), pp.154-156.

Taylor, Anthea. 2016. Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster. UK: Palgrave MacMillan

Yoda, Tomiko .2017. GIRLSCAPE: The Marketing of Mediatic Ambience in Japan. In M. Steinberg & A. Zahlten (Ed.), Media Theory in Japan (pp. 173-199). New York, USA: Duke University Press.

Wilson, K., 2018. Red pillers, sad puppies, and gamergaters: The state of male privilege in internet fan communities. A companion to media fandom and fan studies, pp.431-445.

Woods, Rachel, and Benjamin Litherland. 2018. “Critical Feminist Hope: The Encounter Of Neoliberalism and Popular Feminism In Wwe 24: Womens Evolution.” Feminist Media Studies 18 (5): 905–922.

Zhao, E. J. 2021. Reconfiguring audience measurement in platform ecologies of video streaming: iQIYI’s pivot toward data-driven fandom and algorithmic metrics. International Journal of Communication, 15, 21.

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CFP: Blockbuster Futures

May 10, 2024

October 28–30, 2024 | Indiana University Cinema | Bloomington, IN

Blockbuster films have been instrumental to the evolution of the art and economics of the film industry for decades. What Charles Acland (2020) calls the “blockbuster strategy”— “the rationale that embraces the big-budget cross-media production at the expense of other industrial and artistic approaches” (8)—underpins contemporary industrial, technological, and aesthetic models of global blockbuster filmmaking. Yet, blockbusters are on the precipice of change, and in the U.S., they are showing their first signs of sustained destabilization. Black Widow and The Eternals (both 2021) were the first two Marvel Cinematic Universe films to fail to make back their costs in theatrical release. Several box-office failures from established franchises landed in 2023, including The Marvels, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. That same year, Disney announced a decrease in funding and content development in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. High-profile film cancellations like Batgirl, Black Adam 2, and Wonder Woman 3, combined with company streaming losses from subscriber plateaus and high-cost-low-return blockbuster franchise TV production, signal a growing caution around the form. Simultaneously, Hollywood continues to depend on international markets as the primary revenue drivers even while global blockbusters are thriving outside of Hollywood’s influence. Indeed, the global success of India’s RRR (2022) and China’s homegrown blockbusters like The Battle at Lake Changjin II (2022) and Moon Man (2022) generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.     

Despite the complexity of these variables and the associated turbulence they engender, it’s clear blockbusters won’t be abandoned by global film industries anytime soon. As we approach the next phase of the blockbuster, this conference is interested and invested in thinking through the past and present of global blockbusters, broadly constructed, to imagine blockbuster futures across medium, industries, geographies, time, business models, genres, forms, and aesthetics.

Encouraged topics can include but are not limited to:

  • Intersections of blockbusters and race, representation, gender, and/or sexuality
  • Blockbusters as sites of transnational flows of financial and cultural capital
  • Blockbusters and geopolitical impacts on cultural creation
  • Blockbusters and postcolonialism/neocolonialism
  • Inclusive film production
  • Technological and aesthetic developments in effects-based filmmaking
  • Permutations in the development, use, and utility of the term “blockbuster”
  • Genre blockbusters/genre and blockbusters
  • Impacts of blockbuster filmmaking on exhibition
  • Indie blockbusters/independent film and blockbuster strategies
  • Blockbusters and streaming
  • Blockbusters and television
  • Intersections of games (electronic and other) and blockbusters
  • Risk in blockbuster filmmaking/financing
  • Work on specific franchises (MCU, DC Cinematic Universe, Fast and Furious franchise, Mission:
    Impossible franchise, etc.)
  • Below-the-line blockbuster labor (including unionization)
  • Blockbuster franchises as star systems
  • Blockbuster aesthetics
  • Queering blockbusters
  • Cripping blockbusters
  • Blockbuster filmmaking as industrial strategy and practice

This conference will serve as the foundation of a special issue of The Journal of Popular Culture focused on blockbuster futures.

Conference submissions are due by JUNE 1, 2024 11:59pm EDT. We strongly encourage practitioners—
filmmakers, programmers, and exhibitors—to participate in the conference to help connect blockbusters to their broader impacts on film ecosystems. Submissions can take the form of preconstituted panels (min of 3 and max of 4 participants) or individual submissions.

Submission Requirements for Preconstituted Panels:

  • panel abstract (1300 min-1500 max characters without spaces)
  • paper abstracts for each presenter (1300 min-1500 max characters without spaces)
  • bio for each presenter (300 min-400 max characters without spaces)
  • 3 keywords that best describe your panel

Submission Requirements for Individual Submissions

  • paper abstract (1300 min-3000 max characters without spaces)
  • presenter bio (300 min-400 max characters without spaces)
  • 3 keywords that best describe your panel

Blockbuster Futures will include a keynote by Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence (editors, The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film, 2024) on race, genre filmmaking, and blockbuster resistance. Additional keynotes to be announced.

Blockbuster Futures includes a pre-conference weekend marathon screening of the Fast and Furious franchise (films 1 through 10: Part 1) on October 26 and 27.

SUBMIT

Questions? Email: bfconf24@iu.edu

Blockbuster Futures Partners is funded in part by a grant from the IU Bloomington Public Arts & Humanities project and is presented in partnership with The Media School at IU Bloomington.

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CFP: The Copy InVisible Culture issue 39

May 10, 2024

Issue 39 – The Copy

Deadline: Submissions due June 30, 2024 to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

As a practical and conceptual device, the copy has remained important to many disciplines. Imitation, as Paul Duro describes, has a long global history as it appears in art and visual culture (Duro, 2014). Matters of authenticity, resemblance, and repetition carry multiplicities of meaning across time period and cultural context. The central importance of imitation and/or copying in artistic forms/traditions is only further reflected in contemporary discourse on AI-generated art and theft. In film and media studies, early discourse on mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1935) shaped the field of media studies while, much later, digital technology raised questions of whether digital manipulations and remixes destroyed cinema’s status as an indexical medium (Rodowick, 2007). Indeed, the digital turn of the 1990s continues to shape questions of cinema’s reproducibility to this day.

As described by Lev Manovich more than 20 years ago, new media’s ability to cut, assemble, remix, and widely circulate digital information has become central to the way we create, consume, and experience media (Manovich, 2002). We inhabit an era where everything is copyable and manipulable and where the “original” can be increasingly hard to find. From the endless replication of memes, the mimetic performance that structures social media platforms like Tik Tok, to the automated content reproductions and facsimiles populating the gray markets of the content economy; the copy is a central form, act, and function. Copies continue to fuel long standing debates about originality and authenticity, mimicry, and reproducibility. Recent examples include concerns over plagiarism in YouTube video essays and the rise of NFTs as guarantors of authenticity over digital objects.

Of course, copying never required the affordances of digitization, as evidenced by reproductions ranging from earlier Roman copies of Greek statues to the architectural imitation observed within the urban simulacrascapes of China. (Bosker, 2013) Contemporary artists use copying as well, like Yinka Shonibare’s use of symbols and intertextuality to remake Victorian and Edwardian costumes and sculptures in “African” batik fabric. Shonibare’s work challenges imperialism and explores cultural hybridity. It also underlines the need to attend to the copy as a cultural form.

For Issue 39, InVisible Culture asks: What is there to say about the copy today? How do we account for the copy in visual culture, specifically in a contemporary moment where technologies such as AI and digital fabrication have taken such a prominent role in society? As digital media is no longer “new,” does any novelty remain in the digital copy? What does the physical act of copying physical media do/mean differently today? How does the process of imitation/copying continue to shape social dynamics, aesthetics, and politics?

InVisible Culture invites issues that engage with copies/copying as manifested in visual culture, from material reproductions/facsimiles/castings/sculpture to the aesthetics and circulation of digital media. Moreover, we encourage submissions that engage with copying or imitation as it pertains to sociality, whether it be in through “imitation publics on Tik Tok” (Zulli and Zulli, 2022); how online data collection reshapes human subjects as “informational persons” (Koopman, 2019); or what citation does in different cultural contexts (Duro, 2014).

We invite works from the disciplines of film studies, media studies, art history, anthropology, and visual studies on topics that are not limited to but include:
• Digital cinema
• NFTs, authenticity/theft of digital art
• Memes
• Mimesis and mimicry
• Parody and pastiche
• Sculpture
• Social media and mimicry/repetition
• Digital identity/performance/performativity
• Seriality and serial art
• AI-generated art
• Fakes, forgeries, and bootlegs
• Cross-cultural replication
• Representations of race/gender/culture in copies
o Especially gaming and digital media “asset swapping”
• Replica modeling
• The double/doppelganger
• Post indexicality in cinema and photography
• Photographic processes
• Print copy machines, zines

Articles
Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by June 30, 2024. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture accepts works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to or contact the same address.

Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). For this issue we particularly encourage authors to submit reviews of games or other forms of interactive media. To submit a review proposal, go to https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

About the Journal
InVisible Culture: A Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through double-blind peer-reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialogue across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.

Each issue includes peer-reviewed articles, as well as artworks, reviews, and special contributions. The Dialogues section offers timely commentary from an academic visual culture perspective and announcements from the editorial board.

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CFP: Fan Personas

May 9, 2024

Call for Papers
Forthcoming Themed Issues
Fan Personas: Vol. 10, No. 2, 2024

The entanglement of identity and performance within fandoms have been central components of fan studies, whether these fans are focused on sports, music, film, television, literature, celebrity, or something else. Their shared interest and investment in the fan object provide fans with common ground on which to build a collective identity, while the fan object can be a rich source of identity markers, from logos and colour schemes to moral values and philosophical positions. As argued by Busse and Gray in The Handbook of Media Audiences (2011, p. 426), being a member of a fandom facilitates “a particular identity that affects and shapes its members in ways beyond shared media consumption”.

In this issue, we invite scholars to bring understandings of identity from fan studies into conversation with ideas of a strategic performance of self, extending existing work on fan personas from both within the Persona Studies journal and beyond. In doing so, we wish to explore how a ‘fan persona’ might be utilised by fans for specific purposes or in different interactions, or to frame individual perspectives, beliefs or interpretations within collective spaces.

In tandem with Christopher Moore’s (2020) call in Transformative Works and Cultures for a “persona-inflected fan studies”, we are making space in this issue for a fan-inflected persona studies. In clarifying the potentials offered to fan studies scholars by engaging with persona studies, Moore (2020, ¶ 1.9) points to P. David Marshall’s exploration of “the move from representational media (print, film, radio, and television) to presentational media (the internet, social media, and streaming platforms, among many others)”, as well as the concepts of intercommunication, micropublics, and the dimensions of persona (see Marshall, Moore & Barbour 2020). Similarly, research and theorisation around fan objects, names, performances, and communities, and the impact of these on movement between collective and personal identities (see Busse 2017, Chin & Morimoto 2013, Hills 2002, Jenkins 1992, Peyron 2018 among others), can usefully be deployed from fan studies into persona studies.

In this Fan Persona themed issue, we invite both traditional article and creative practice submissions that engage with personas in (and beyond) the following areas:

Mediatised fans
Embodied performances of fandom
Fannish behaviour and practice
Fan communities
Niche fandoms
Mainstream fans
Performing anti-fandom
Intersectional analyses of fans
Materiality and fandom
Fan status
Theorising fan personas
Platforms, infrastructures, and fans
Contested fandoms
Toxic fans/fandoms
Conflicting fandoms
Representing fans
Fan parasociality
Fan investment
Celebrity fandom

Works cited
Busse, K 2017. Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Busse, K & Gray, J 2011. ‘Fan Cultures and Fan Communities’. In The Handbook of Media Audiences (eds A. Sreberny & V. Nightingale), pp. 425-443. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444340525.ch21

Chin, B & Morimoto, LH 2013. ‘Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom’. Participations, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 92-108. https://www.participations.org/10-01-07-chin.pdf

Hills, M 2002. Fan Cultures. Routledge, London.

Jenkins, H 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, New York.

Marshall, PD, Moore, CL & Barbour, K 2020. Persona Studies: An introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ.

Moore, CL 2020. ‘An approach to online fan persona’. Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 33 https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1703

Peyron, D 2018. ‘Fandom Names and Collective Identities in Contemporary Popular Culture.’ In The Future of Fandom Special Issue (eds K Busse & K Hellekson), Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 28. https://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1468

Submission guidelines:
Initial abstracts should be 150-250 words long, with full papers to be between 5000 and 8000 words in length, inclusive of reference list, or an equivalent for creative practice submissions. When submitting for consideration, please identify how your work is responding to the theme of the issue. We encourage scholars to engage with, build upon, and/or challenge existing persona studies scholarship, including (but not limited to) work published in this journal. You can find information about the journal’s focus and scope as well as our peer review policies here: https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/ps/about.

Submission timeline:
Abstracts (or full papers if available) submitted issue editors

22 July

Author notification and invitation to submit for peer review

2 August

Full submission due for peer review

7 October

Review and revision period

October-November

Issue publication

December 2024

Contact:
For further information or to submit an abstract, please contact issue editors Dr Kim Barbour, University of Adelaide (kim.barbour[at]adelaide.edu.au) and Dr Mark Stewart, University of Waikato (mark.stewart[at]waikato.ac.nz).

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