Okay, well thank you very much for virtually having me in your classroom today.
I'd like to thank Lars Schmincke for giving me this opportunity to participate in an innovative program,
some of which I plan to steal from my future classes,
and Mike Smith and Jeremy Games at A&M Commerce's Faculty Center for Teaching for Technology
for helping me with the technology at this end of the lecture.
I'm a professor of Literature and Languages.
My teaching and scholarship includes creative writing, critical theory,
new media and fan studies, and digital humanities.
I've been a fan of science fiction in the broadest sense of the word since I was five.
And my father was a geologist.
He left his analogues and amazing stories sitting around,
and I was reading them alongside L. Frank Baum's Oz series,
and later J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
I sometimes tell people I got a PhD in English just so that I could teach science fiction and fantasy,
which I do regularly.
I was active in Star Trek fandom during the late 1970s when I was an undergraduate,
and then I became a member of APA 5 in the early 1980s.
APA stands for Amateur Press Association.
So this was in the days when we were doing everything in hard copy with no machines.
But APA still exists.
They're sort of a cross between a fanzine and a pen pal club.
That is, a group of people do their own fanzines, put them all together, and you get to read everybody's stuff.
I had to gaffeate that is getting away from it all, getting away from fandom
when I began writing my dissertation in 1992.
Fandom is hard to maintain when you're writing a dissertation.
But in 2003, because of Peter Jackson's live-action films for Lord of the Rings,
I found myself back in fandom.
This time in online media fandom, which was even cooler than the APA.
And within a few more years, I found myself doing scholarship on fandom.
Sort of the whole idea that you all were talking about what is a fan, what is it about fandom,
what is it about fanfiction, especially that is so interesting.
My academic dream with journal, which is what I have up here,
is where I blog about some of my fan scholarship.
In fact, I identify as an APA fan, an academic who does scholarship on fandom,
but someone who has also been a fan and is a fan.
I was a fan before I was an academic, and so they're sort of all carried over.
And Dreamwidth is a social networking site.
I have a fan, Dreamwidth Journal, which I don't share because that's under my fandom pseudonym.
This is a space in which I talk about the work I do in fandom.
One element of fan study is it can be slightly different than some others,
and this connects to some of the issues of ethics that are raised in the social sciences.
That is, I am a member of the community, so I'm an insider academic.
And I am open in my fandom persona about my academic work,
but to be responsible to the fan community, I also put up material that I do.
I can't put up exact text because of the previously published rule.
If I publish my presentations or essays online,
I can't get them published in the academic publications.
But I can put up descriptions of what I do, data, all sorts of things.
So if you're interested in the stuff I'm doing,
this would be where you could go to find out more information.
The text of my lecture, when I put it up, will have direct links to all these things that I'm clicking to.
My expertise is really within the U.S. fandoms,
although there is very much an international kind of focus in even the English language fandoms online.
But the work that I know best is on the U.S. fandom.
I know there are active fandoms in Australia and the United Kingdom,
and I've heard very much that there are hugely active fandoms in other languages.
There is a Russian language science fiction fandom on LiveJournal.
There is a huge Japanese language fandom.
There's also a huge English language fandom of anime and manga.
So the Internet, of course, is allowing all this cool stuff to happen.
When I was asked to pick a representative text or to list for this lecture,
I found myself more than stymied because fan-produced texts
can include all of the following categories and more.
There are millions of fan fiction published on the Internet.
If you Google fan fiction, you'll see the huge amount of stuff that comes up.
But there are also fan videos, equally millions of fan videos published on the Internet.
In the lecture talk, there are a bunch of direct links to these Google searches,
which will show you the scope of what is out there.
There are also millions of filk songs.
Filk music is fan-created music, which consists of parodies and original content.
Certainly it came within the science fiction con culture,
but nowadays it's also published on the Internet,
both in audio and video formats as performances, as well as posting of lyrics.
The term filk, by the way, is believed to have started with a typo for folk music
in an early science fiction con program.
And as fans tend to do, this new coinage was seized upon to be an example
of the special jargon of fandom, that is fan-speak.
And there are many glossaries for fan-speak all over the Internet.
There is also costume play or cosplay, which consists of fans creating
and or wearing costumes to represent characters from their favorite fandoms.
You have communities where people talk about their how to create the costumes.
You have communities dedicated to tips for going to the cosplay contests online.
And you have places where people just produce and show their own cosplay.
Gaming, of course, is huge.
And a lot of the major games have their roots in Lord of the Rings by Tolkien,
Dungeons and Dragons being the first.
And it has become a worldwide gazillion-dollar industry.
So you can have multiple types of science fiction gaming fans and online,
console, and live-action role-playing.
There's also a variant of role-playing in the social networking communities,
such as Dreamwidth or LiveJournal, the first one,
where fans will do a journal in the persona of their character
and interact with each other.
That's, of course, a completely free and creative kind of fan-ish activity.
Fan art has existed for decades.
And despite the association of fandom with the news to technologies,
all this work we do on the Internet,
there's a growing interest in fan-crafting, which is distinct from cosplay
and which involves fans making a multitude of material objects,
whether they're knitting, sewing, baking, based on their fandom sources.
So if you Google fan-crafting, you can find really cool stuff.
And I mean, we're talking in some ways about hugely complex created art.
Another more material-based fan act or fan activity is science fiction model build.
I'm not even sure this list is comprehensive, though I've been adding to it for days,
because the creativity and productivity of fans seems to approach infinity.
Nor are these all separate activities.
That is, a fan may write fan fiction in their favorite game setting.
Fans will make videos of the group doing live-action role-playing.
Communities of fans come together to teach each other things,
give each other tips, share information, as well as applaud each other's creativity.
And fans are not limited to specific fandoms.
They can move among or be active in multiple fandoms
and be in online and offline fan groups and activities.
So, for example, a fan con will these days have websites and discussion groups
and all sorts of ways to reach out to fans beyond the immediate area.
In the face of this astronomical amount of fan production,
I just did not feel that choosing any single text
or even a small number of texts would be representative.
So after some discussion with my online friends,
who are primarily in Lord of the Rings fandom, but not entirely,
I decided the best single text to ask Lars to list
would be the 1990 film Galaxy Quest.
I'm a fan of this film, and I actually had a YouTube video with a part of it,
but we can't get it to embed for this production,
but it's linked in the text version of this.
But it also connects to a number of activities
that I think are important relating to fandom
and the parts that I want to say about fandom.
It's an homage or parody of Star Trek, which the original series,
considered to be one of the first, if not the first,
of the major media fandoms.
It emphasizes fandom as a group of people coming together
because they love a text and engaging in activities together
while being regarded as kind of weird by their families.
Before we started here, we were talking about the ways
in which fan has sometimes been used as a derogatory kind of commentary.
The film also shows negative aspects for the actors
because of having such a wide popularity in a genre film.
They cannot get other shows.
They're not taken seriously as actors,
which I think connects to the ways in which science fiction
as a genre has not always been seen as respectable slash literature.
And it comments, I think lovingly, but also critically,
the limited nature of roles for women in such popular culture texts.
The moment in the film that turned me from an appreciative viewer into a fan
was when the captain told a fan that, quote, it's all real.
That's why this lecture is titled, It's All Real.
That is, he had been yelling at the fans earlier
for thinking the ship was really real and everything was real,
but because the movie involves a group of aliens who have lovingly
created everything in the show as real, it turns out to be real after all.
So rather than any single example of a fan text,
this lecture focuses on the concepts of fandom as activities and groups.
And there are gazillions of them.
These might be found offline or entirely online or interact in both spaces.
And although there are some generation issues,
you can't necessarily count on that.
That is, I know a number of fans who, like myself,
are in their 50s or 60s and very active online.
So it is not only the 20-somethings.
Okay, what this lecture will cover.
Given the time limits I have and wanting to allow for questions at the end,
which are always the most interesting,
I'm going to do a quick overview of some important elements of fandom,
including a short history of fandom in the US.
And I have included in the text of this lecture
and the stuff at the end material on fandom in other countries.
That scholarship and that work and those fans really, you know,
they're doing their own work.
I'm not even going to try and pretend to be an expert on fandom in Canada or the UK.
I'll also be discussing some of the major changes in fandom
in the later part of the 20th century and among the first part of the 21st.
And that, of course, includes not only the technology of the internet,
which has resulted in an explosion in the size and types of fandoms.
It has also provided fans an opportunity to document their own productions and histories.
Science fiction fans were among the earliest adopters of the new technologies
as Henry Jenkins in convergence culture has established.
And fans have been using the internet to create fandom communities and clubs,
document fandom histories, archive fandom productions,
and study and discuss the texts that are the heart of their fandoms
since the 1980s before the very, you know, big movement onto the internet.
Okay, some interesting information on the terminology, the naming.
You know, why we have the word fan instead of enthusiast or connoisseur.
The word fandom has been in use for well over a century
and it's shown by the entries and quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The term fan comes from fanatic.
And while a great deal of attention has been paid to science fiction fandoms,
the earliest print sources using the term are referring to sports fans.
That terminology was needed to reflect the mass audience
that began to follow the growing cultural and commercial activities.
Cheap publishing magazines, films, television sports, et cetera
during the early part of the 20th century.
The coinage of fandom puts fan together with an old English suffix,
a very old word, dom, like kingdom,
that carries the sense of a state of being and also the state of a domain or a realm.
So we can think of fandom as speaking to groups who come together
around a shared interest in some cultural production
and who share a space and a sense of being.
And if you check the languages, there's also specific terminology for fandom.
You can identify yourself as an insider by knowing some of the terminologies,
like gaffeate, although I notice that's kind of fallen out of usage in fandom these days.
The fact that the term was first used for sports fandom
is something I talk a lot about in my classes, because at least in the U.S.
and especially in Texas, if you're a football fan, I mean, this is considered awesome.
You will follow your team, you will play fantasy football,
you will dress up in costumes, you will paint yourself in the team colors,
some teams reserve special free seats for their most enthusiastic and ardent fans,
and somehow this is all really cool because, wow, we're supporting sports and football.
Whereas if you dress up in a funny costume and go off for a weekend to speak Klingon
and there is a Klingon language institute, you can learn Klingon
and they are busy translating the Bible into Klingon as well as the Klingon Hamlet.
You're weird, and so I often get my students to look at the fact that similar behaviors
among sports fans and science fiction fans are valued very differently.
Although I will say in the last 50 years of being involved in science fiction and fandom
that there has been cultural shifts in this.
So this lecture is only on science fiction fandom, but I'm using science fiction as a fairly broad umbrella term,
a genre term that's quite broad, showing how science fiction fandoms
dedicated to what has been called speculative fiction or fantastic literatures
that appear these days in multiple types of media, anime, comic books, film, gaming,
graphic novels, television, as well as the books, which were the starting point,
have grown over the past century and more.
Sorry, I have some fun allergies in Texas.
Okay, brief history of United States fandom.
Science fiction fandom in the U.S. began in the early part of the 20th century.
The first readers, the first fans were readers of science fiction, fantasy and horror stories
published in pulp magazines.
And I know you guys have had a lecture on the pulp era,
and that's exactly where fandom originated in the U.S.
When Hugo Gernsback, an inventor and an immigrant, started those popular magazines
devoted to an amazing new modern genre of literature that he called scientific fiction,
he encouraged readers to send letters about the stories and the essays in the magazines in
and he published them in letter columns.
The printed letters back in those innocent days included mailing addresses
and fans began to write letters to each other.
As Helen Merrick, an Australian science fiction scholar, argues,
science fiction fans created virtual communities by letter writing
well before the world wide web or internet began.
The fans not only corresponded with each other, but if they were living in the same city,
they got together and created fan clubs.
They published their own magazines, fan magazines or fanzines, usually abbreviated as zines,
and they began to organize conventions, cons, for fans and creators to come together
to talk about science fiction in the universe.
And it was not at all unusual in those early days of the 20s, 30s and 40s
that the fans became the writers, that is Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke,
Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, a huge number of the major SF authors started in fandom
and were publishing their own fanzines.
There are letters from a young Isaac Asimov in the early fanzines.
So for several decades, science fiction conventions, and now we'll see if my link pulls up,
and fanzines were some of the most important ways in which fans identified themselves.
That was fandom space and community, and these still are.
This is a list in Wikipedia of some of the science fiction conventions.
Notice that this is distinct from anime conventions, comic book conventions,
furry conventions, gaming conventions, horror conventions, and multi-genre conventions.
There are cons all over the world, and a number of cons, especially from years ago,
have tried to create scholarships to bring in international fans.
So getting a fan from Australia to the U.S. for some of the cons, for example, was not unusual.
So this is the name of the fans, where they're held, the country they're held in,
and the kind of focus that is there, plus various dates for them.
And you can just skim through and see some of the huge number of cons that are out there.
Okay, Worldcon is really the biggest sort of fan con.
It moves around various places. Various fan groups do bids for it.
It's the biggest in the sense of sort of still fan run cons.
And something to realize is that the first science fiction cons were run by fans for fans,
and some still are Worldcon, as an example.
However, later, in especially the later part of the 20th century,
for-profit corporations began running large multi-media cons that draw in thousands of fans.
We don't see this here, but if you go over to the comic one,
and a number of you might even have heard about this,
Comic Con is a four-day event that draws over 100,000 attendees.
I have never been. I quit going to cons once they got so big, and also once I got to be a doctoral student.
Part of it was money.
So the changes in cons over the years reflect some of the changes in science fiction fandom.
The earliest ones focused primarily on the fiction published in the pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks,
with some focus on films, once some of the really popular SF and fantasy films started being produced.
And again, a number of science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury being one of the most known,
but Harlan Ellison and a bunch of others, also wrote for TV and film.
So there wasn't strict boundaries between the areas in those days.
The explosion of media materials in all genres in the past few decades
has been matched with cons that focus on anime or manga, comic books, gaming, or all of the above.
And a number of cons, especially the gen ones, will feature an art room, gaming rooms,
television and film rooms, cosplay contests, gaming rooms, and a whole lot of other fan activities.
Some cons will be very specifically focused on a specific property or genre.
Others will be much more general or multimedia.
Another change in fandom is related...
Oh, sorry. I was going to bring down fan publications, fanzines.
As I said, the major space for fandom for many years was cons and fanzines.
And fanzines were produced, of course, in the older days, in Ditto and Mimeograph
and some of the earlier technologies since the 1920s.
I know a person who has been involved in producing fanzines since the 40s and he still produces them,
but he also puts his hard copy fanzine online to an electronic zine.
And if you really want to see some of the basic stuff of fandom,
finding fanzines will give you a huge insight into that specific groups.
I was actually the editor for my Star Trek groups fanzine,
because I'd been a classics major, was titled Literei Tredikin, the letter of Outpost 13,
and we did a half dozen issues or so.
Some of the fanzines, though, maintained and became semi-prozines and grew.
Locust, for example, which is the primary science fiction and fantasy zine,
started as a fan publication as semi-pro now.
So that movement from fan to professional happens in a great many science fiction areas.
Some of the other changes in science fiction fandom are related to changing demographics,
especially the inclusion and participation of a growing number of women
and increasing ethnic and sexual diversity.
The image of the science fiction fan as a young white adolescent male is no longer accurate.
It's still shown a lot, it's believed to be true, but it's not accurate.
Although I will acknowledge here that there is no demographic study of fandom that covers everything.
When you look at the scope of fans offline and online, there's simply no way to have done this.
There's other evidence of the changing nature of fandom,
but it is something that I wish we could get more and better demographic studies than we've had in the past.
The popularity of Star Trek is often pointed to as one of the reasons for a growing number of women fans in U.S. fandom.
Women are the subject of Camille Bacon Smith's 1992 book, Enterprising Women.
However, women were active in fandom long before Trek, as later publications by Justine Labastier,
The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction in 2002,
and Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal, A Cultural History of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Feminisms in 2009 show.
And I've taught both those books in my classes, they're very, very good, very accessible to read.
Just as I was, women were reading and participating in science fiction fandom from an early age without necessarily being known
and during the earliest pulp periods, but there's been an ongoing erasure and marginalization.
The joke is that every 10 years, people rediscover, wow, there are girls in this fandom, what's happening?
In the context of the social changes in the later half of the 20th century, feminism, civil rights movements, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender rights movements,
the demographics of fandom have changed.
That is what is happening in fandom reflects what is happening in the larger culture.
This is facilitated by the internet, which provides venues for fans to participate in fandom that go beyond the science fiction con culture.
For example, when I was growing up in Moscow, Idaho, I think there was me, my dad, and a handful of other people who were into science fiction,
we were just sort of weird and we were very isolated.
I'm now in a very small town, Commerce, Texas, 7500 in rural Texas, same thing,
although there are actually enough fans these days for our campus to have a science fiction club, which I advise.
But a lot of my fan activity takes place on the internet.
I just don't manage to make it into Dallas and others for some of the cons.
So these last two decades have seen a huge growth in fandoms and the interactions between different kinds of fandoms.
That is, people in science fiction fandom overlap with people in anime fandom.
Overlap in people in some of the sports fandoms, actor-based fandoms, it just sort of all comes together.
But there's actually a bit of a history for science fiction fans online.
During the 1980s, news groups such as Usenet were an early online fandom space and can still be accessed.
So here is the Usenet guideline for Rec Arts SF Fandom.
And here is the space, although obviously the technology is changing around it.
So even before the World Wide Web became much more accessible and it was only text-based,
science fiction fans were talking about science fiction online.
And that was very much during the 80s.
Then came the websites and discussion lists and mailing lists.
That is, this was especially during the early 90s.
This is a site, you can see it's not been updated since I think 1998 or so, May 1998.
But it is still there, some of the things seem to be still active.
You would have a website, this would be set up and run by a single fan or a couple of fans.
They would set the policies and many of those were associated with discussion lists.
And this would, again, be regulated by the fans who owned and ran it.
That went through the 90s.
They were online, these Usenet and mailing lists, but tended to mimic in some way some of the traditional offline spaces for fandoms.
That is, they were fairly specialized.
You could actually have something called the fantasy and science fiction mailing list
and think that you were covering much of science fiction and fantasy.
But that centralization began to fragment with the movement of science fiction fandoms into the social networking spaces.
First with the creation of LiveJournal in 1999.
LiveJournal was an early social network and blogging platform.
Fans were early adopters of LiveJournal, though just as they were with Usenet, although it was not solely for science fiction fans.
And LiveJournal's code was open source, so a number of other fan spaces could be created, both clones and forks of LiveJournal.
So the growing number of social networking sites, which is the phenomenon referred to as Web 2.0,
where the focus becomes much more on interaction and collaborative things and commentary and user-created content.
YouTube, of course, is very old and very classic Web 2.0.
This movement online meant science fiction fandom could become accessible for many fans who were not able to access the local clubs or cons in cities.
Of course, you still have to have internet access, and that makes it a rather privileged space in those ways.
And yet, still, that led to much more open participation in fandom by a greater variety of fans.
It's also led to more visibility and attention being paid by the mainstream media, who love to yank out certain weird fandom sites and say,
ooh, look at these strange people, and to some extent, increasing awareness of fans as ways to make money by the corporations.
Okay, so a quick overview of some of the ways in which diversity and fandom have operated.
First is feminism. The primary and perhaps only feminist science fiction convention is Wisconsin,
which has been held every year since 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin.
The first Wisconsin was a small one started by a group of students at the University of Wisconsin.
In fact, I know Jan Bogstadt, who's one of the founders.
It is currently now a four-day event hosted by a committee of over 100 people that has become world-known as the primary place for the feminist science fiction community gathers.
And it runs in ways that are quite fascinating. They have very much non-hierarchical ways of getting programming up and doing things.
Starting in the 70s, it was very much dedicated to a feminist perspective that downplayed hierarchy and tried to empower more people.
Wisconsin is also the primary place associated with the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, which is the only science fiction award that recognizes the exploration and expansion of gender roles in science fiction and fantasy.
The Tiptree Award is named after James Tiptree, which I didn't take that, but it's easy. It'll be in the text award.
James Tiptree, Jr., which is a pseudonym that was used by Alice Bradley Sheldon to publish her award-winning science fiction.
And the Tiptree revelation after 10 years of publishing when it came out that Tiptree was actually a woman just rocked fandom and the science fiction community of the time.
Because there had been all of this debate around Tiptree's portrayal of women characters, issues of men writing science fiction, women writing science fiction.
The 70s, Tiptree started publishing in 67 and Sheldon was revealed in 77.
The 70s were a decade when a good many women writers were breaking into science fiction and fantasy publishing, and there was a lot of complaining by some authors.
So the Tiptree Award was founded by women science fiction authors, but it is in no way limited to women science fiction authors.
A number of men have won this award.
Diversity in fandom also includes the gay lesbian bisexual transgender fans.
This is the link to the Lamba Sci-Fi group, and there's also, if I managed to pick that up or not, the Gay Laxicon group.
Oops. Oh well. That originated in 1986, the Gay Lactic Network, and has since grown into a national organization with fan clubs all over.
Fans have run campaigns to get more gender and sexual diversity in the science fiction media.
One of the most famous is a year-long campaign to get a gay character in Star Trek, which met without any great success at all, although there are rumors that the next J.J. Abrams film will have a gay character.
But finally, some fans gave up, and this is what fans do. They began creating their own gay Star Trek.
This is the site for the Hidden Frontier, which is a whole series of episodes, very high professional quality, which is what fans can do in these recent days with the technology that's out there, that rewrite their text.
That is, the main characters in the Hidden Frontier are gay men, and many people don't know what's out there, but it's a great example of what fans will do when they're not always happy.
That is, the gay fans loved Star Trek. Many of them were Trekkies along, as I was in the early years, but became increasingly frustrated with a film or a franchise that promoted itself as diverse and progressive that was not able to get away from straight characters and straight relationships.
Other issues of diversity in fandom are the race debates. If you remember, my academic journal talked about race fail, and that's one of the areas that I've been working on.
In 1998, Samuel R. Delaney, Jr., who was one of the major science fiction authors, award-winning author, and one of the perhaps half a dozen African-American science fiction authors, published an article titled, Racism and Science Fiction in the New York Review of Science Fiction.
This was an incredibly powerful document by one of the leading writers in the field, and had all sorts of resonances throughout fandom.
The article was later reprinted in the first anthology of African-American science fiction, Cherie Thomas' Dark Matter, which was published in 2002.
It also inspired the formation of the Carl Branden Society, which is also mostly associated with WISCON.
WISCON as the site of the progressive social justice areas of fandom, as I said, worked not only with the Tiptree founders, but also with the Carl Branden Society, which was announced at the 1999 WISCON.
The Society's mission is to, quote, increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of an audience for speculative fiction, and their vision is, quote, a world in which speculative fiction about complex and diverse cultures from writers of all backgrounds is used to understand the present and model possible futures, and where people of color are full citizens in the community of imagination and progress.
I would say the Carl Branden Society has had much more effect than the letter-writing campaign to the Star Trek producers, who of course mostly, if not entirely, all white men, because Carl Branden, although it doesn't limit it to it, focuses more on books.
And in the last 10 years or so, there have been an increasing number of science fiction fantasy publications by authors in the U.S. of different ethnic groups, and a wider sense of fantastic literatures in other national cultures.
So, by looking at the people who are producing the text, as well as what is being produced, Carl Branden is making, as I said, a greater difference, possibly because books are not as highly valued as films, and so that people can break into them more, rather than getting handed a gazillion dollars to do a major film.
Okay, the Carl Branden Society is, as I said, been formed for some years in working with it. There's another community called Race Bending, oh, sorry, got a head on myself.
Okay, Carl Branden has been in existence since 1999. In 2009, a wide-ranging discussion about race and racism in the science fiction and fan communities took place online.
It's called Race Fail 09, if I can go back to mine. And again, you'll notice that is the main focus of my academic journal.
This discussion that has become defined as Race Fail 09, which took place in January, February, and March of 2009, was not the first time there were debates in online fandom about racism.
There had been a number of debates in earlier years, but those are mostly in very specific fandoms. For one thing, there was a huge race discussion in Harry Potter when it came out that Blaise Zabini, one of the minor characters in the book, was a black British schoolboy.
There was fights about the casting of Cho Chang, so within specific communities, fandoms, there were debates.
The Race Fail debate differed from those earlier ones, not only in being huge. There were over a thousand posts in a Race Fail archive that are associated with that time period, but it crossed fandoms.
It was not specifically directed at, say, Harry Potter fandom or the racist portrayal of orcs in the Lord of the Rings film fandom. It was about racism in fandom as a whole and also the issue of cultural appropriation.
Materials used by writers in representing minority cultures. And rather than just being a discussion among fans, a number of prominent editors and writers became involved as well.
And this was taking place on LiveJournal and the other social networks and also among blogs and bloggers. That discussion also showed some real split between the fans, writers and editors who chose to work in blogs versus the social networks.
And some of the differences in communication and expectations were made very, very clear.
And out of that have come a number of events, including a group called Ang Ain't White or racebending.com that are dedicated to working to educate people on the problems with the lack of ethnic diversity in the media.
They started working to protest the Shyamalan adaptation of Avatar, The Last Airbender, because although the original children's programming in that area was celebrated for being about religious, historical, cultural and material elements from China and India instead of medieval England,
the casting call that was issued in 2007 asked for Caucasian or any other ethnicities. So the phrase whitewashing, where you take a text that is set in cultures that do not have Anglo-looking characters and whitewash the characters of color by casting white actors.
So that has been active ever since 2009 and is continuing to build and move. And it has engaged in a number of efforts to educate both in the academic level, in fandom and in the media.
So we see racebending, I single out as an interesting one because of its focus on working with people in different spaces, not just many who are fans, but fans who are also academics or producers.
As Henry Jenkins notes in the final two chapters of his convergence culture, one thing the internet allows is the possible opportunity for participatory democracy.
He sees this as changing the playing ground when the old media no longer control the public airwaves. I would argue, and I mean he implies this throughout his book because he says fans were the first ones doing this, the social justice work that is being done within fandom relating to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity has been done and is being done in science fiction fandom in a very real way,
affecting both fans online and offline and the cultures those fans exist in. And that's sort of my idea of how real fandom can be. Fandom is often seen as escapist from the real world, but if you pay any attention to all the work that is done in social justice work, it very much is the real world.
I've only been able to give you some very quick overviews. I mean, I can talk about some of these individual topics for an hour all on their own, but there are many resources imprinted online that can be used if you want to study more about fandom.
And when I publish the text version of this, I'll have links to a whole bunch of fandom memoirs by people and also the fan history materials online. And although much of the current fandom is on the internet to start with, fans have also been using the internet to preserve the history of fanzines before the internet came along.
There are also a number of libraries at special collections and academic libraries to do with fan materials. And in fact, I'm thrilled to say that one of the big collections is actually in Texas at the Cushing Library at Texas A&M University, which is the flagship of my system that I'm in.
So you can find the stuff that I've linked to in the text project. And if you just keep going from there, you'll find a whole huge amount of material that is dedicated to showing all the various types of fandoms, the history, the various work that's done, both creative and critical.
And be careful, is all I can say, because I did not plan to become an Acafan or a fan scholar. I was working happily on feminism and science fiction for 10 years, and then suddenly got sucked into online fandom and ended up doing this work.
So be aware of that problem. Thank you very much.