Alexis Lothian
Biographic Data
| ID | 790826 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexis Lothian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexis |
| FAMILY NAME | Lothian |
| SIGNATURE | LOTHIAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5216-2699 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Captain America, Genderqueer Socialist: The Utopian Politics of Queer Fan Fiction
As a practice of literalizing narrative desire, fan fiction can be a rich source of utopian imagination. Participants in fandom and academic spaces alike discuss the capacity for fan fiction’s content to live up to the utopian potential of its form and distribution: how might a cultural formation based on the fantasy fulfillment of desire hold space for the complex and contradictory relationships between pleasure and power? To unpack some contrad…
An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure
In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of …
Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility
Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transf…
From Transformative Works to #transformDH: Digital Humanities as (Critical) Fandom
Digital humanities is an amorphous and contested field, network, discourse, or discipline. This essay argues that it is best understood as a fandom—and that there is much to learn from attending to processes and practices of scholarly field formation through lenses developed by fan theorists, practitioners, and scholars. This approach positions digital humanities as operating in excess of institutional logics, treating the affects and conflicts t…
Vidding and identity
Whether exploring how gender- or racebending characters in fan art might function as a form of representational critique, or why predominantly straight women enjoy composing homoerotic fiction featuring male characters, identity has frequently been at the heart of scholarly discussions of fans&s; transformative works. Fan vidding, or the art of using "music in order to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals, to stage a reading, or occ…
Choose Not to Warn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy
Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 743 Alexis Lothian Choose Not toWarn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy OMG, academia is having the warnings debate. A year or so ago, I typed this message into an online chat window. I was talking about the eruption in blog posts, higher education think pieces, and intense Facebook arguments about "trigger warnings" in the classroom —especially cl…
A Speculative History of No Future: Feminist Negativity and the Queer Dystopian Impulses of Katharine Burdekin'sSwastika Night
The theme of this and the previous special issue has been a flashpoint in the interdisciplinary field of queer studies since Lee Edelman's influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman argues that to be queer is to oppose futurity, coining the term "reproductive futurism" to describe the tendency to define political value in terms of a future "for the children" and insisting that the power of queer critique inheres in it…
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, a…
Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera
This article explores the politics of digital memory and traceability, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and on queer theories of performance and ephemerality. Its primary example is the Organization for Transformative Works, a successful advocacy group for creative media fans whose main project has been an online fan fiction archive. I am concerned both with this public face and with the activities that fans would prefer to keep out of …
Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: The Uses of Remix Video
Vidding is a thirty-year-old remix practice in which predominantly female media fans reedit television or film into music videos. Vidding is important not only as an art form in its own right but also as a subcultural — and often feminist — reinterpretation of and confrontation with mainstream media culture. The feminist manifestations of vidding range from the creation of deeply felt emotional odes to television and film, to the analytical teasi…
“Yearning Void and Infinite Potential”: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space
Research Article| September 01 2007 "Yearning Void and Infinite Potential": Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space Alexis Lothian; Alexis Lothian University of Southern California [email protected] Alexis Lothian is a doctoral student in English at the University of Southern California, specializing in queer and feminist theory and cultural studies. Her interests include geek literatures and cultures, futurity, utopia, and the Internet. Search f…
Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera
This article explores the politics of digital memory and traceability, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and on queer theories of performance and ephemerality. Its primary example is the Organization for Transformative Works, a successful advocacy group for creative media fans whose main project has been an online fan fiction archive. I am concerned both with this public face and with the activities that fans would prefer to keep out of …
From Transformative Works to #transformDH: Digital Humanities as (Critical) Fandom
Digital humanities is an amorphous and contested field, network, discourse, or discipline. This essay argues that it is best understood as a fandom—and that there is much to learn from attending to processes and practices of scholarly field formation through lenses developed by fan theorists, practitioners, and scholars. This approach positions digital humanities as operating in excess of institutional logics, treating the affects and conflicts t…
Choose Not to Warn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy
Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 743 Alexis Lothian Choose Not toWarn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy OMG, academia is having the warnings debate. A year or so ago, I typed this message into an online chat window. I was talking about the eruption in blog posts, higher education think pieces, and intense Facebook arguments about "trigger warnings" in the classroom —especially cl…
A Speculative History of No Future: Feminist Negativity and the Queer Dystopian Impulses of Katharine Burdekin'sSwastika Night
The theme of this and the previous special issue has been a flashpoint in the interdisciplinary field of queer studies since Lee Edelman's influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman argues that to be queer is to oppose futurity, coining the term "reproductive futurism" to describe the tendency to define political value in terms of a future "for the children" and insisting that the power of queer critique inheres in it…
Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: The Uses of Remix Video
Vidding is a thirty-year-old remix practice in which predominantly female media fans reedit television or film into music videos. Vidding is important not only as an art form in its own right but also as a subcultural — and often feminist — reinterpretation of and confrontation with mainstream media culture. The feminist manifestations of vidding range from the creation of deeply felt emotional odes to television and film, to the analytical teasi…
“Yearning Void and Infinite Potential”: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space
Research Article| September 01 2007 "Yearning Void and Infinite Potential": Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space Alexis Lothian; Alexis Lothian University of Southern California [email protected] Alexis Lothian is a doctoral student in English at the University of Southern California, specializing in queer and feminist theory and cultural studies. Her interests include geek literatures and cultures, futurity, utopia, and the Internet. Search f…
Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: The Uses of Remix Video
Vidding is a thirty-year-old remix practice in which predominantly female media fans reedit television or film into music videos. Vidding is important not only as an art form in its own right but also as a subcultural — and often feminist — reinterpretation of and confrontation with mainstream media culture. The feminist manifestations of vidding range from the creation of deeply felt emotional odes to television and film, to the analytical teasi…
Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera
This article explores the politics of digital memory and traceability, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and on queer theories of performance and ephemerality. Its primary example is the Organization for Transformative Works, a successful advocacy group for creative media fans whose main project has been an online fan fiction archive. I am concerned both with this public face and with the activities that fans would prefer to keep out of …
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, a…
Choose Not to Warn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy
Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 743 Alexis Lothian Choose Not toWarn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy OMG, academia is having the warnings debate. A year or so ago, I typed this message into an online chat window. I was talking about the eruption in blog posts, higher education think pieces, and intense Facebook arguments about "trigger warnings" in the classroom —especially cl…
A Speculative History of No Future: Feminist Negativity and the Queer Dystopian Impulses of Katharine Burdekin'sSwastika Night
The theme of this and the previous special issue has been a flashpoint in the interdisciplinary field of queer studies since Lee Edelman's influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman argues that to be queer is to oppose futurity, coining the term "reproductive futurism" to describe the tendency to define political value in terms of a future "for the children" and insisting that the power of queer critique inheres in it…
Vidding and identity
Whether exploring how gender- or racebending characters in fan art might function as a form of representational critique, or why predominantly straight women enjoy composing homoerotic fiction featuring male characters, identity has frequently been at the heart of scholarly discussions of fans&s; transformative works. Fan vidding, or the art of using "music in order to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals, to stage a reading, or occ…
From Transformative Works to #transformDH: Digital Humanities as (Critical) Fandom
Digital humanities is an amorphous and contested field, network, discourse, or discipline. This essay argues that it is best understood as a fandom—and that there is much to learn from attending to processes and practices of scholarly field formation through lenses developed by fan theorists, practitioners, and scholars. This approach positions digital humanities as operating in excess of institutional logics, treating the affects and conflicts t…
Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility
Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transf…
An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure
In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of …
Captain America, Genderqueer Socialist: The Utopian Politics of Queer Fan Fiction
As a practice of literalizing narrative desire, fan fiction can be a rich source of utopian imagination. Participants in fandom and academic spaces alike discuss the capacity for fan fiction’s content to live up to the utopian potential of its form and distribution: how might a cultural formation based on the fantasy fulfillment of desire hold space for the complex and contradictory relationships between pleasure and power? To unpack some contrad…
Sociology (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Digital Games and Media (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (4 works)