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Killer Fandom is the first long-form treatment of serial killer fandom. Fan studies have mostly ignored this most moralized form of fandom, as a stigmatized Bad Other in implicit tension with the field's successful campaign to recuperate the broader fan category. Yet serial killer fandom, as Judith May Fathallah shows in the book, can be usefully studied with many of the field's leading analytic frameworks. After tracing the pre-digital history of fans, mediated celebrity, and killers, Fathallah examines contemporary fandom through the lens of textual poaching, affective community, subcultural capital, and play. With close readings of fan posts, comments, and mashups on Tumblr, TikTok, and YouTube, alongside documentaries, podcasts, and a thriving "murderabilia" industry, Killer Fandom argues that this fan culture is, in many ways, hard to distinguish from more "mainstream" fandoms. Fan creations around Aileen Wuornos, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Richard Ramirez, among others, demonstrate a complex and shifting stance toward their objects—marked by parodic humor and irony in many cases. Killer Fandom ultimately questions—given our crime-and violence-saturated media culture—whether it makes sense to set Dahmer and Wuornos "fans" apart from the rest of us.

All fandoms engage in gatekeeping. Whether or not we agree that contemporary media fandoms comprise something like 'communities', the '-dom' suffix to the term 'fan' necessitates some conception of a group, and groups have boundaries. These boundaries are always in tension, and self-defined true crime fans are a tricky case. True crime is mainstream, an endlessly profitable and staple of the media landscape. However, true crime fans must negotiate and police a boundary that separates them from the posited figure of the Bad Fan. This article examines the Reddit subforums r/TrueCrime and r/SerialKillers, analysing posts that discuss and police the boundaries separating the right kind of interest in true crime from this posited Bad Fan. I argue that while true crime enthusiasts tend to present their gatekeeping work as an ethical practice, it is often more to do with maintaining gendered norms than it is about morality or propriety.

The genealogy stretching from Romanticism to the tortured poets of the emotional hardcore music scene is by now well established. Emotional hardcore, or emo, is invested in the construction of the usually White male artist, a sensitive and creative being subject to a great deal of suffering – as a result both of his artistic nature and of the external forces aligned against him. The European Romantics invented the concept of artist as cultural icon – Lord Byron is often considered Britain's first celebrity. He was also, not coincidentally, Britain's first literary vampire. This article utilizes a discursive analysis based in open coding to consider emo fandom's obsession with the figure of the vampire, especially what emo fans – who are mostly girls – have done with it in fanfic. Considering the gendered genealogy of the vampire, and the problematic gender politics of the emo scene, I explore how the constraints and opportunities of these discursive structures influence the ways emo fans imagine vampires, who appear so often in their writing. Picking out key themes of sex, race and the ethics of the vampire inherited from both emo fandom and vampire literature generally, I argue that the selected sample demonstrates a transformative impulse towards race and sex, which is ultimately still contained by the overarching discursive structures within which artists operate.

Queerbaiting is a fast-expanding topic in media and cultural studies. In 2015, this author attempted to define queerbaiting as a strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the patronage of queer viewers via the suggestion of queer relationships, before denying and laughing off the possibility. Joseph Brennan's 2019 edited volume has greatly developed the concept of queerbaiting to include a range of meanings, from media industries' pledges of allegiance to LGBT causes that are not delivered upon to courting queer viewers via paratexts that imply queer relationships that don't exist in text. Applying the concept of queerbaiting to bands complicates these ideas, as the "truth" or "delivery" of queer representation lies not in a fictional text but the public persona of real performers. Through an examination of stage-gay, the notorious practice of queer performativity on stage by straight performers in the emo music subculture, I investigate how a restrictive notion of "truth" in discussions of queerbaiting can actually close off the very possibilities of transformation and open-ended configurations of sexuality that Alexander Doty's formulation of queerness promised. Emo bands are the natural case study here, as emo is an offshoot of hardcore and punk that sought to complicate the hegemonic masculinities dominating those genres, both in its musical and lyric content, and the public and paratextual performativity of its artists.

Queerbaiting is a fast-expanding topic in media and cultural studies. In 2015, this author attempted to define queerbaiting as a strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the patronage of queer viewers via the suggestion of queer relationships, before denying and laughing off the possibility. Joseph Brennan's 2019 edited volume has greatly developed the concept of queerbaiting to include a range of meanings, from media industries' pledges of allegiance to LGBT causes that are not delivered upon to courting queer viewers via paratexts that imply queer relationships that don't exist in text. Applying the concept of queerbaiting to bands complicates these ideas, as the "truth" or "delivery" of queer representation lies not in a fictional text but the public persona of real performers. Through an examination of stage-gay, the notorious practice of queer performativity on stage by straight performers in the emo music subculture, I investigate how a restrictive notion of "truth" in discussions of queerbaiting can actually close off the very possibilities of transformation and open-ended configurations of sexuality that Alexander Doty's formulation of queerness promised. Emo bands are the natural case study here, as emo is an offshoot of hardcore and punk that sought to complicate the hegemonic masculinities dominating those genres, both in its musical and lyric content, and the public and paratextual performativity of its artists.

The genealogy stretching from Romanticism to the tortured poets of the emotional hardcore music scene is by now well-established. Emotional hardcore, or emo, is invested in the construction of the usually-White male artist, a sensitive and creative being subject to a great deal of suffering - both as a result of his artistic nature, and of the external forces aligned against him. The European Romantics invented the concept of artist as cultural icon - Lord Byron is often considered Britain's first celebrity. He was also, not coincidentally, Britain's first literary vampire. This article utilizes a discursive analysis based in open coding to consider emo fandom's obsession with the figure of the vampire, especially what emo fans - who are mostly girls - have done with it in fanfic. Considering the gendered genealogy of the vampire, and the problematic gender politics of the emo scene, I explore how the constraints and opportunities of these discursive structures influence the ways emo fans imagine vampires, who appear so often in their writing. Picking out key themes of sex, race, and the ethics of the vampire inherited from both emo fandom and vampire literature generally, I argue that the selected sample demonstrates a transformative impulse towards race and sex which is ultimately still contained by the overarching discursive structures within which artists operate.

"In 2007, while giving a book talk, Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling revealed an interesting fact about beloved character Albus Dumbledore's love life. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," she said as the audience erupted in cheers. She added: "I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy." Though most fans initially praised the announcement, LGBTQ fans in particular questioned why the author chose to make it informally, while never actually writing explicitly gay characters into the storylines. As it turns out, this type of bait-and-switch is fairly common between fans and creators; there's even a term for it: "queerbaiting." In this first comprehensive examination of queerbaiting, fan studies scholar Joseph Brennan and his contributors examine cases like Rowling's to shed light on the exploitative industry practice of teasing homoerotic possibilities that, while hinted at, never materialize in the program narratives. Looking at everything from popular TV series to video games to children's programs, and more, these essayists--some of the biggest names in the emerging field of fan studies--explore the consequences of the misleading practice, both for fans and creators. The result is a first-of-its-kind collection that is sure to appeal equally to fan, queer, and media studies students and scholars"-- Introduction: A History of Queerbaiting / Joseph Brennan -- Part 1: Theoretical Perspectives -- 1. Queerbaiting 2.0: From Denying Your Queers to Pretending You Have Them / Emma Nordin -- 2. Queerbaiting, Queer Readings, and Heteronormative Viewing Practices / Monique Franklin -- Reclaiming Queerbaiting: A Call to Action / Elisabeth Schneider -- The Queer Temporalities of Queerbaiting / Evangeline Aguas"Heterobaiting": Black Sails and the Subversion of Queerbaiting Tropes / Leyre Carcas -- Part 2: Popular Case Studies -- 3. Supernatural: Wincest and Dean Winchester's Bisexual Panic / Emily E. Roach -- 4. The Gay Elephant Meta in the Room: Sherlock and the Johnlock Conspiracy / E. J. Nielsen -- 5. "Watch This Space": Queer Promises and Lacunae in Rowling's Harry Potter Texts, or, Harry Potter and the Curse of Queerbaiting / Jennifer Duggan -- "Friends? Always": Queerbaiting, Ambiguity, and Erasure in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child / Cassie Brummitt and Kieran Sellars -- Queerying Subtext and Fandom in Xena: Warrior Princess / Holly Eva Katherine Randell-Moon -- From Canon to Politics: Queerbaiting and The CW's Supergirl / Michael McDermott -- Part 3: Wider Contexts and Aligned Subjects -- 6. Celebrity Queerbaiting / Joseph Brennan and Michael McDermott -- 7. What Was Missing: Children's Queerbaiting and Homoromantic Exclusion in Adventure Time and Steven Universe / Bridget Blodgett and Anastasia Salter -- Hollywood Queerbaiting and the (In)Visibility of Same-Sex Desire / Guillaume Sirois -- Queerbaiting and Real Person Slash: The Case of Larry Stylinson / Clare Southerton and Hannah McCann -- Queerbaiting and Beyond: Japanese Popular Culture and Queer Politics / Divya Garg -- Cultural Reinforcement: Queerbaiting and the Fan Art Segment / Danielle S. Girard -- Multiversal Queerbaiting: Alan Scott, Alternate Universes, and Gay Characters in Superhero Comics / Christoffer Bagger -- Queerbaiting in Video Games: A Case Study of Overwatch / Mary Ingram-Waters and Isabela Silva -- This One Loves That One: Queerbaiting at the Eurovision Song Contest / Jessica Carniel

For many, the word "emo" calls to mind angsty teenagers, shaggy black haircuts, and skinny jeans. A popular music phenomenon in the early 2000s, emo is short for "emotional hardcore," and refers to both a music genre and a youth scene notable for its androgynous style. Judith May Fathallah pushes beyond the stereotypes and social stigma to explore how online fandom has shaped the definition of emo, with significant implications both for millennial constructs of gender and for contemporary fan studies. First laying out the debate over what emo is, Fathallah walks superfans and newcomers through the culture surrounding the genre's major bands, including the emo holy trinity: My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco. Next she examines fans' main mode of participation in the emo subculture—online communities such as LiveJournal, Tumblr, MySpace, and band websites. Taking a hard look at the gender politics that dominated those spaces, she unearths a subculture that simultaneously defines itself by its sensitivity and resistance to traditional forms of masculinity, yet ruthlessly enforces homophobic and sexist standards. Fathallah demonstrates fandom's key role in defining emo as a concept and genre after 2001, with probing insight into its implications for gender constructions through popular music.

Abstract
Accountability to participants is a topic of some debate within fan studies. Whilst working with people requires informed consent, it may be legally defensible to freely quote any fan work found online. Reflecting on my research experience, this article argues for a responsibility to ask permission from fan creators before sharing their work in academic and other contexts. An ethics of transparency is beneficial not only to fans, I argue, but to the development of fan studies and its continued dialogue with fandoms.

Review of Lynn S. Zubernis and Katherine Larsen. Fandom at the crossroads: Celebration, shame and fan/producer relationships. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Hardcover, $67.99 (250p) ISBN 978-1443835305; paperback, $24.99 ISBN 978-1443841405; and Lynn S. Zubernis and Katherine Larsen. Fangasm! Supernatural fangirls. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. Paperback $14.67 (246p) ISBN 978-1609381981; e-book $17.48 (6732 KB) ASIN B00F5S6IIK.

An autoethnographic view of the hurt/comfort genre, its significance, and its appeal.

Interpreted through Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of resistant laughter, the fan insert character of Becky from Supernatural can be read as an invitation to appropriate the narrative for their own pleasure. However, outsiders to the fan community may not recognize that Becky's depiction is hyperbolic and may thus read the character as a damaging stereotype.