Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Editorial número especial "Fandom" Palabra Clave

This paper starts from the idea of the cultural relevance of television, according to which its narratives are central to knowing the history, politics, the stories about the nation and a recent memory of our Latin American countries. Here, I present the results of a research that illustrates, through development groups, how Brazilian viewers interpret Colombian narco-te- lenovela Escobar, el Patrón del Mal, with the aim of understanding how recent history was built, as well as the political and cultural conflicts of that society from a television product. My conclusion is that the meanings attributed by the participants of the groups revealed important aspects of this role of television in our societies. The narco-telenovela faced them with the intricacies of a problem that is deeply embedded in Colombian culture and politics; it also helped them to understand the phenomena and events of our own reality from a critical standpoint and showed them that our Latin American societies develop, for be er or worse, their own strategies of entry into modernity. 

In this paper we analyze the editorial position of Argentina’s political magazines Somos, Extra, and Redacción regarding the FIFA World Cup that took place in June 1978 in Argentina during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). e event was the auspicious moment for the military government to a empt to show a positive image of the country in the face of international accusations about its responsibility in the violation of human rights. In this context, the local political press legitimized the government’s version and rejected the international claims against the country. Furthermore, the analyzed magazines o ered their points of view on the e ects that organizing the World Cup had on domestic politics, stimulated by the popular celebrations that followed the success of Argentina’s national team in the competition. ey showed similarities and di erences as to how the Government should use the political capital le by the World Cup, how the relationship between the military and civilians should be strengthened, and what would be the role of military president Jorge Videla in the alleged convergence of interests. 

As media consumption grows increasingly niche and distribution extends further away from old network and print models (Lotz, 2007), media producers continue to hone their marketing toward ever more specific audiences. Yet, while fan-centred franchises and crowdfunding projects have garnered some scholarly attention, there has been less discussion of the ways that gender, race, and sexuality intersect with media production and marketing. This paper analyses the crowdfunded comic My So-Called Secret Identity (MSCSI) and its attempts to appeal to female comics fans. MSCSI was launched in 2013 with the aim of countering misogynistic depictions of women in comics. Created by academic Professor Will Brooker, the series focuses on Cat Daniels, an ordinary girl who becomes a superhero. I examine how the production and branding processes of the comic were used in paratexts to market MSCSI to women as specifically gendered audiences. In particular, I consider the implications of gendered (and de-gendered) media texts on the ways that content producers imagine female audiences, as well as how they commodify and capitalize on these audiences. I argue that the comic’s tagline #smartisasuperpower, the design of the website and the deliberately female creative team function to appeal to female comic book fans and introduce new fans to the genre. I suggest, however, that the paratextual elements of MSCSI resulted in ambivalent responses from comic fans and critics, demonstrating the contradictions and difficulties of producing and branding a gendered text for a gendered audience.

There are several studies nowadays that address the analysis of participatory cultures and, more specifically, the fan audience of movies or television series. Henry Jenkins, moving away from the stereotype of brainless consumers and social misfits who dedicate their lives to developing “useless knowledge,” marks a turning point by suggesting a fan profile that corresponds to educated people. From this moment, fan studies are living their golden age with different researchers or aca-fans who study and analyze the phenomenon in their different countries of origin. The general objective of this research is to take an x-ray, study and describe the Spanish fan audience regarding their digital skills. There are also two secondary objectives: to make a comparison between fan audience and non-fan audience according to their digital skills and to analyze the correlation degree between the level of digital skills of the fan audience and the number of series and movies of which they consider themselves to be fans. To address these objectives, an ad hoc online questionnaire was administered, involving 1003 audiovisual fiction consumers, whose data were analyzed using a quantitative methodology. Descriptive and comparative analyzes allowed us to conclude that, first of all, the practice that fan audience control is the search for information. Second, the fan audience has greater digital skills than nonfan audience. And, finally, that the level of skills in the content interaction and editing elements in fans is directly proportional to the number of products of which the audience consider themselves to be fans.

As with all border concepts, the concept of chronicle is not exactly crystal clear, particularly when looking for a definition that generates consensus or that acquires some kind of universality. In this paper, we attempt to define it by making a historical review in order to try and understand its diferent nuances. A chronicle is a hybrid and polysemic term that is somewhere between literature and journalism. After analyzing the journalistic varieties, we were able to identify three types of productions: first, a modality linked to present times, which is shorter; second, long-winded productions, which are demanding in terms of research and access to sources; and third, a variety of author’s texts of a more essayistic nature, which uses the informative element only as a starting point. With this distinction, our goal is to unravel the confusion generated by the journalistic genre, since a chronicle is the first modality in Spain, while in some Latin American countries the diferent meanings coexist under the same name. 

In everyday conversation and in the social networks, we may come across the term cult in reference to people, places, movies or television programs. In this paper, we propose a few conceptualizations about the notion of cult TV, applied to Brazilian television fiction, and particularly soap operas. The first section focuses on the theoretical dialogue between authors who discuss the concept of cult TV (Pearson, 2010; Hills, 2010) and who point out the relationship between the expression and the innovative or critical content of a narrative, its nostalgic appeal or, mainly, to fan engagement. Then, we describe the empirical research carried out in three stages: 1) analysis of tweets in order to draw a parallel between the theoretical conceptualizations and the use of the term by the viewers; 2) questionnaire administered in online networks that pointed out which soap operas were considered as cult by viewers; and 3) focal group discussing the reasons why those soap operas were mentioned. Based on these guidelines, the paper highlights fans’ investment in one of the most cited productions in the questionnaire, Avenida Brasil, a recent production that made visible the link between the concept of cult and fans’ manifestations online. As a result, the paper contributes to the theoretical conceptualization of cult, opens a dialogue between international theories and the Brazilian context and shows, from the point of view of viewers, how fans can turn a soap opera into a cult.

Despite their notable popularity, fan-made movies or fanfilms have received little scholarly attention compared to written, graphic, performative or even audiovisual fanworks, to the point that one could say that they are a somewhat “uncomfortable category.” While fans’ audiovisual practices such as vidding, remixes, recuts or machinima are well adjusted to fandom theories, fanfilms tend to recreate a narrative canon, as well as some values of production, toying with formal codes identical to the source texts. The technical complexities of its more ambitious exponents also imply a greater barrier, which entails a specialization and a hierarchical organization of equipment within the limits of industrial activity. The main purpose of this article is to further the knowledge on fanfilms in their diversity, considering continuities and differences regarding certain attributes—also “canonical”— of fan creations, as well as audiovisual self-production, in order to make a contribution to the still scarce scientific literature on the subject. For this purpose, we analyze different example cases from an initial corpus and go into detail about the activity in a case considered as paradigmatic—the Hive Division collective. As reflected in the paper’s conclusions, fan-made films require reconsidering suppositions from both fields, such as legitimacy or authenticity, reevaluating motivations and observing the similar challenges faced in connection with other creative fan practices.

doi:10.5294/pacla.2017.20.1.1