Organization for Transformative Works News

Black Girl Nerds posted about loving fanfiction, and by extension, its most prolific creators. "I read your work on the bus, in between classes, during lunch breaks, before bed. Your writing has gotten me through boring lectures, eternities spent in waiting rooms, long car rides, and just plain bad days where all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and forget how absolutely terrible the world can be.

It was your words that I first discovered before many of the WOC-authored published works I’d come to love. It was you who first helped me learn that genre fiction didn’t have to represent yet another place where Black people didn’t belong, that there could be a place on any planet, any world, any reality, for girls like me."

How many reasons can you come up with to love fangirls? There’s certainly more of it going around: http://bit.ly/1YL3LH5

The Deseret News spoke with various fans about how fandom has changed their lives. “'I started to feed back into nerd culture and all those happy feelings, basically everything that fandom gives you — not just escapism, but the immediacy of enjoying something with someone else,' Smith said. “'I realized nerdiness isn’t being happy alone, it’s about being happy with other people. Nerdiness saved me from myself.'”

A new profession, a new relationship, understanding yourself, your favorite reads — it’s all part of being a fan http://bit.ly/1OOSxzf

At ComicMix Emily S. Whitten expounds on what years of GISHWHES activity has brought us.

"Other than all of the nifty things accomplished due to Gishwhes, I think the biggest thing I take away from it is the warm and positive attitude of the competition and everyone involved. It’s encouraging and inspiring to see all of the people who have chosen to celebrate and express their fandom in a fun and inclusive way; especially because, in the end, it is always our own personal choice as to how we want to move through the world; and how we choose to put ourselves out there can have bigger consequences for change than we can ever imagine."

Fandom can be about finding connections and building great things together – here are some examples http://bit.ly/1FyrIM2

Henry Jenkins was recently honored by the Science Fiction Researchers Association and used the opportunity to discuss fandom's history when it comes to diversity.

"Those of us who pioneered fandom studies too often bracketed race and class in order to focus on gender, sexuality, and generation. As we sought to validate forms of cultural production and experience that were meaningful to us, we neglected the fact that our own ranks were still too narrowly constituted and that there was more we should have done to validate forms of culture that were meaningful to a more diverse population.

However much we might have sometimes felt like outcasts in our own lives, we were still in a privileged position to help inform what kinds of cultural production and reception mattered in an academic context."

Displaying your fandom doesn’t always bring happy results, but things can change & so can fandom's representation http://bit.ly/1KaDpEw

A more thoughtful article at Refinery29 points out that SDCC is hardly a bastion of feminism yet. "What we’re calling fangirls here covers an admittedly wide and amorphous group of women. They’re cosplayers, comic book collectors, sci-fi nerds, steampunk enthusiasts, booth babes, Lolitas, and more....And they are vocal: When the proportion of female writers and artists for DC Comics plunged from 12 percent to 1 percent in 2011, female fans started a petition for DC to hire more women. DC Comics responded by promising to try. Female fans from a group called the Carol Corps. were also instrumental last year in pushing Marvel to announce plans for a movie about Captain Marvel, a super-powered woman. In other words, fangirls are engaged and numerous, making up a significant portion of the audience that shells out hard-earned dollars to support their pop culture passions. And yet, despite that, this group remains the third estate of the comics / fantasy world."

Fangirls by the numbers, by the year, by the film portrayal & by their issues: http://bit.ly/1LTQaJS