Writing of cultural studies in 1986, Tania Modleski observed that female scholars, “denied access to pleasure, while simultaneously being scapegoated for seeming to represent it,” have no recourse within a critical framework but to accept an “adversarial position” towards popular culture. In the same way, when fangirls’ emotions are the thing tha…[Read more]

I explore the history of Japanese writing centered on Sherlock Holmes as a means of interrogating the 2014 BBC Sherlock pastiche John and Sherlock Casebook 1: Jon, zenchi renmei e iku (The stark naked league), written by Japanese Sherlockian Kitahara Naohiko for mainstream publication by the publishing house Hayakawa shobō. I argue that…[Read more]

A videographic exploration of Hannibal through the lens of fanvids

Introduction to the themed section on Transcultural Fandom in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies

Media industry efforts to monetize fandom have thrust issues of economy and labor to the forefront of present-day fan studies, centering on case studies that interrogate media producers’ strategies for both cultivating and capitalizing on fans of individual media franchises. Yet, such strategies (and the research they engender) are not always…[Read more]

Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s lectures on Edgar Allan Poe, and the influence they exerted on his own works.

Benedict Cumberbatch fandom in Japan

When Jackie Chan was introduced to Japanese audiences in the early 1980s, he was promoted as the answer to the void that popular martial arts star Bruce Lee had left upon his death in 1975. The mischievous ‘monkey’ to Lee’s more ferocious ‘dragon’, Chan’s films were aggressively marketed to an audience of male martial arts fans; yet this…[Read more]

Recent years have witnessed the growth of a body of literature concerned with what Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has termed “Chinese cinemas,”1 sparked by the increased international visibility of films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and characterized by an emerging interest in the ways that such works negotiate both “the triumphantly…[Read more]

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

When I proposed this paper, the idea was to examine a number of global iterations of Sherlock fandom from a transfandom perspective. However, as doing this in fact involvesgoing ‘deep’ in at least two popular cultural contexts in order to effectively pull out examples of how I believe transfandom works more generally in a transnational set…[Read more]

In December 2012, Benedict Cumberbatch arrived in Japan for the first of two “Star Trek Into Darkness” junkets and was greeted at the airport by 500 Japanese fans of his work in the BBC drama “Sherlock” (2010-), the first two seasons of which had aired on subscription satellite channels to niche acclaim. This unanticipated turnout did not go…[Read more]

Michael Newman and Elana Levine observe that “much of what we identify as Quality, complex, and sophisticated in American television since at least the 1980s achieves that status in part through its ability to mark itself off from soap opera” (2012, 99), particularly through the rejection or containment of signifiers of soap opera’s feminine orien…[Read more]