Featured Articles
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“Trans Memory as Transmedia Activism” in Social Movements, Cultural Memory, and Digital Media (2020)
Abigail de Kosnik and Julia Havard
In this chapter, we examine how a range of American transgender (which we abbreviate as ‘trans’) communities, events, and cultural productions have been transmediated—that is, adapted and transformed—into live events, independent and studio films, television series, news stories, online crowdfunding campaigns, and social media controversies. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6
“Piracy Is the Future of Culture: Speculating about Media Preservation after Collapse” in Third Text, Vol. 34 (2020)
Abigail de Kosnik
Current conditions of global climate change, fossil fuel exhaustion, economic precarity, and political unrest may be indicators that modern industrialised society is on the verge of Collapse. What will happen to digital and digitised media – files of images, text, films, television series, audio recordings, video games, and so on – in the event of Collapse? The author argues that individuals who exchange such files online via peer-to-peer protocols, who are deemed ‘pirates’ by the culture industries, are in fact amateur archivists whose personal caches of digital media will be the most likely to survive catastrophic change. Indeed, catastrophic change will not be catastrophic for all parties: Collapse may put an end to capitalism, which optimises for the rapid obsolescence of cultural commodities and combats the unpaid exchange of goods in myriad ways, thereby preventing official archives and libraries from implementing strategies for the legal preservation of digital culture. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1663687
“Why It Matters that Black Men and Queer Women Invented Digital Remix Culture ” in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Vol. 59, no. 1 (2019)
Abigail de Kosnik
Black men and queer women invented digital remix culture. In the mid- to late 1980s, Black men developed and popularized digital sampling, a technique of extracting segments from existing recordings and using them to form the musical tracks of hip-hop songs. In the 1990s, queer women founded and populated the first wave of online fan-fiction communities. While many non-Black and nonmale people have made significant contributions to sampling, and nonqueer and nonfemale people have participated heavily in fan production, digital sampling and fan fiction gave rise to the remix culture that has proliferated and thrived on the internet primarily through the creative labor of minority musical and fiction artists. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2019.0069
“Fifty Shades and the Archive of Women's Culture” in Cinema Journal, Vol. 54, no. 3 (2015)
Abigail de Kosnik
In my 2009 “In Focus” essay “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” I predicted that Internet fan fiction communities would soon experience a “Sugarhill moment.” I defined this as “the moment when an outsider takes up a subculture’s invention and commodifies it for the mainstream before insiders do.” I was extrapolating from the history of hip-hop music, which began, like fan fiction, as a subcultural, appropriative, copyright-defying genre (hiphop’s musical tracks often incorporate, or consist wholly of, samples of previously recorded music, and sampling has engendered an untold number of lawsuits for copyright infringement). Hip-hop’s core elements were pioneered and refined by innovative DJs presiding over Bronx block parties and dance clubs throughout the 1970s; then hip-hop broke into the American cultural mainstream with the 1979 release of the Sugarhill Gang’s single “Rapper’s Delight,” a novelty record produced by a band of performers who had nothing to do with the Bronx scene. I quoted Vanity Fair’s Steven Daly, who reflected on how hip-hop was introduced to the US market by novice imitators rather than by the masters of turntablism who invented the genre: “Whenever the key players of hip-hop’s ‘old school’ look back on the pregnant moment when the Sugar Hill label blazed a trail for rap, there remains among them the nagging sense that it all went down the wrong way.” https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2015.0037
“Fandom as Free Labor” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (2012)
Abigail de Kosnik
Historically, fan activity has been derided as frivolous, irrelevant, and even pathological. In his book Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins traces the uses of the word fan from its origins in the Latin word fanaticus, which bore connotations of (Jenkins cites the Oxford Latin Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary) “orgiastic rites and enthusiastic frenzy,” “excessive and mistaken enthusiasm,” and “possession by a deity or demon.” The associations between fandom and insanity persisted into the late 20th century, Jenkins argued:
[T]he fan still constitutes a scandalous category in contemporary culture, one alternately the target of ridicule and anxiety, of dread and desire. Whether viewed as a religious fanatic, a psychopathic killer, a neurotic fantasist, or a lust-crazed groupie, the fan remains a “fanatic” or false worshipper, whose interests are fundamentally alien to the realm of “normal” cultural experience and whose mentality is dangerously out of touch with reality. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203145791-9