Introduction

Introduction Kristina Busse (bio) Introduction When Cinema Journal asked me to provide a possible image for the cover of this issue, several came to mind. Yet trying to find an accessible, representative, legal, high quality picture proved difficult. In fact, my search for such an image metonymically illustrated many of the central concerns addressed in this In Focus. There are many amazing works of fan art and screenshots from fan vids (TV or film clips cut to music), but most of them require at least an understanding of the source text, if not the fannish context, to become comprehensible. Many of these images might not strike a casual reader as feminist because the feminist impetus lies in the way women manipulate and co-opt media representations. In addition, these images draw from copyrighted sources, so that most are on uncertain legal grounds, even as fans and scholars alike argue for their legality on transformative grounds.1 Finally, the greatest—and possibly most telling—obstacle in obtaining a useful cover image is that of finding a source with sufficiently high resolution. Fannish art is grassroots and amateur, and predigital, third- or fourth-generation sources often produce deteriorated or low-quality images. Trying to showcase fannish creations is thus complicated by the very subcultural constraints that make it worth studying in the first place. "Fandom and Feminism" offers a fruitful pairing that allows us to consider the work of feminism in popular culture and the role of media texts within feminism. The different contributors in this section all focus on various dimensions of what has been termed media fandom. In the late 1960s, a group of science fiction fans started focusing on television and film, foregrounding characters and narratives. These [End Page 104] primarily female fans began creating stories, art, and videos that continued, expanded, and analyzed the narrative universes and transformed the visual stimuli, with Star Trek (NBC, 1966–1969), in particular, spurring the imagination.2 This particular community, often called media fandom, has been extensively studied and is seen by many creative women fans as their predecessors. These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on.3 Recent scholarship on media fandom in particular has attempted to take into account the ever-growing diversity of fans and fan works, often focusing on a particular fandom or even a single fan work.4 In fact, legitimizing fan works as objects of study in their own right, rather than merely products of an interesting subculture, may be one of the most important shifts in fan studies. Several of the essays presented here do just such close analyses: Francesca Coppa's reading of the Clucking Belles' "Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness" (2005) and Alexis Lothian's reading of Lim's "Us" (2007) both offer analyses of specific fan works even as they connect these to larger concerns. Both of these fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion. Both vids thematize the active viewing and manipulation done by fans. The Clucking Belles' vid foregrounds the repetitive use of tropes that illustrates how many woman fans appropriate and reinterpret these images; Lim's vid actively manipulates the visuals to indicate how fans change and transform the text. "Us" also directly addresses concerns over ownership by manipulating a famous Batman screenshot to show Batman gazing up at a copyright symbol. The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—to the recent founding of the nonprofit advocacy group for fan works, the Organization for Transformative Works: from the...