The peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its special issue: Otherness and Transgression in Fan and Celebrity Studies, Autumn 2017.

Otherness: Essays and Studies publishes research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that critically examine the concepts of otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study.

The notions of otherness and transgression play an essential part in the cultural work and practices celebrities and fandoms perform inasmuch as these concepts are inseparable from the celebrity and fan cultural processes of social in/exclusion, identification and dissociation, uniformity and diversification, and forces both drawing and disrupting demarcations between normalcy and deviance. Otherness and transgression constitute pertinent sites for critical exploration within the two overlapping fields of research, Fan and Celebrity Studies.

A complex and multivalent term, otherness is conventionally signaled by markers of “difference” and the unknown. As difference remains a condition for any determinate sense of identity, otherness is also inevitably implicit and complicit in considerations of subjectivity, identity, and sameness. Likewise, in the field of Fan and Celebrity culture – where categories such as class, gender, race, sexuality, and age dynamically intersect and interact in manifold ways – the identity work, social meanings, and cultural preferences informing both these cultures’ production and consumption of cultural and media texts are also constantly negotiated. Reflexive of the values, biases, and tensions of the social body, they are useful indicators of contemporary configurations and devices for othering; for example, the ways in which the discourses of immorality, pathology, monstrosity, impropriety, and cultism, among others, inform the construction of difference, and function as vehicles for othering that additionally cut diagonally across various imbricating “-isms,” such as racism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, and lookism.

As difference often implies the perception of deviance, otherness is accompanied by the constant impending threat of transgression, to undo and redraw the differentiating limits determining the provisional identities of entities, behaviors, and bodies. While transgression refers to a violation and exceeding of bounds, it also ambiguously realizes and completes these boundaries as it helps define them and reaffirms a given social order by designating the illicit. This dialectic of the de/stabilizing effects of transgression summons further inquiry in relation to fandoms and celebrity cultures.

Fan and Celebrity Studies are in need of a reappraisal in which the new fickle and permeable boundaries between identities, cultural practices, private and public spheres, products and consumers, celebrity and fan bodies, intimacy and estrangement are investigated. Refracting otherness and transgression from overlapping prisms, the pleasures, representations, productions, and affects of celebrity and fan cultures opens up a fruitful and invigorating space for further research. We envision this special issue on Otherness and Transgression in Fan and Celebrity Studies to be one such place.

WELCOME TOPICS INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:

The Intersection of Celebrity and Fan Studies

Sex, Gender, Sexual Differing, and Queering the Fan / Celebrity Body

Cross-Over Celebrities; Ethnicity, Hybridity, and Fandom in Transcultural Contexts

Celebrity Representations of Dis/ability and through Fan Works

The Intersectionalities of Social Categories in Celebrity and Fan Cultures

Notoriety, Infamy, Scandal, Deviance, and Excess Social Media and the Construction of Celebrity as Other

The Construction of Otherness in Fandom and Fan Works

Monstrosity, the Abject, and Uncanny in Fan Fiction, Fandoms, and Celebrityhood

Pathology, Addiction, Cultism, Confession, and Therapy

Mashing and Vidding: Viral and Violating

Authenticity, Secrecy, Intimacy, and Publicity

Post-feminist Celebrity Narratives and Cultural Forms

Power, Prosumerism, and Participatory Culture

New Modes of Self-Other Relations within Para-social Contexts

Fan and/or Celebrity Shaming

The (Im)Material Other Worlds of Fandoms and the Alternative Spaces of Fan Communities

Articles should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with Word document attachment formatted to Chicago Manual of Style standards to the issue editor Dr. Matthias Stephan at otherness.research@gmail.com

Further information: http://www.otherness.dk/journal/

The deadline for submissions is Monday, September 15, 2017.