Here's the presentation I'll be giving at the 'Media fandom and/as labor' panel at Console-Ing Passions in Boston, which takes place at 15h30 today (in about four hours). The hashtag for the conference is #CP2012 in case you want to follow along; the sessions aren't streamed, but people are livetweeting quite a bit ( Read more... )

Today was the last day of the Japan Society for Research in Cartoons and Comics' annual big meetup, and the topic of the final session was doujinshi and copyright. On stage were a manga researcher, a fan researcher, an IP lawyer, a representative from a large publishing company, and a professional mangaka with strong ties to doujin fandom. They ( Read more... )

For those who were interested in the different meanings of the word "genre" in doujin fandom a few months ago, I wrote a Fanlore article about it. Needs some polishing, but the basic info is all there.

Somehow, the hardest part about making Fanlore articles is the math captcha that you need to fill in to be allowed to create the page. It's not that ( Read more... )

Forgot to mention this because the acceptance notification came while I was in Deadlineville. I finally get to visit the US! The place is pretty famous, so this is all rather exciting.

The main reason for this trip is  Console-ing Passions, a feminist media studies conference that will take place in Boston on 19-21 July. l'll be part of Mel Stanfill' ( Read more... )

Home from Tokyo, will get cracking on a bunch of replies now. In the meantime: I looked at the list of pairings on the cover of this dojinshi and felt like a really, really undeveloped fannish person because I only know how to ship mere humans. I should get more practice at looking at the world around me and finding the shipping angle in everything ( Read more... )

The second International Convention on Manga, Animation, Game and Media Art (ICOMAG) will be held in Tokyo this weekend. This year's title is 'Commons of Imagination: What Today’s Society Can Share through Manga and Animation'. The conference aims are described as follows:

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Comiket as a market for fanworks

Introductory post about Comiket, written for TWC's Symposium blog. Since most people have at least some idea of what generally happens at cons, I decided to skip descriptions of the cosplay and such in favor of focusing on how fanworks are sold at Comiket and how Japanese dojinshi fans relate to rights holders. That ( Read more... )

Welcome to part two of this ridiculously long-winded Comiket report. Now that we've dissected the catalog, let's have a look at the general atmosphere of the actual con.

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Note: Comiket is an absolutely huge event, and it's going to take a couple of long posts to describe everything that interested me about it. I'm writing these posts first and foremost from a fan studies perspective, as part of my research, but they may contain traces of squee.

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As promised, here's my talk from the conference Intercultural Crossovers, Transcultural Flows. You can see the presentation in Prezi form below, followed by a quick summary in text form.



(Note: this is just the condensed version of the talk, not a full speech text or conference paper abstract, although a paper based on this talk is in production and ( Read more... )