ALOTR in the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures

We'd like to welcome the new online Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures to the "internets" today. TWC is "an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived," bringing together academics, fans and dabblers alike.

For their inaugural issue, the folks at TWC interviewed the three of us, just a small cluster in the large and nebulous collective we imagine as the "Audre Lorde of the Rings" (ALOTR). Here's a brief excerpt (click on the hobbits to link to the full interview):

Introduction: Labors of love

[1.1] TWC editor Alexis Lothian conducted an e-mail interview with Karen Tongson, Christine Balance, and Alexandra Vazquez, who are professors at University of Southern California, University of California–Irvine, and Princeton, respectively. All three are cultural studies scholars who take nonobjective feelings about objects of study seriously. For the past year, they have been blogging together at Oh! Industry (http://www.ohindustry.com/), celebrating the musical, televisual, and filmic soundtracks to intellectual and emotional lives lived inside the "machine" of the academy and among "domestic zones" of "living rooms, backyards, garages, in our cars, or even just between our headphones." With a motley group of allies in and out of academia, many of whom have contributed to Oh! Industry (O!I) and who share a perspective informed by U.S. women-of-color feminism, queer theory and activism, and a determination to "never run away from being serious about 'non-serious' things" and to "never hide [their] irreverence towards objects and industries that others take too seriously," they have formed an unofficial intellectual collective they call the Audre Lorde of the Rings (ALOTR).

[1.2] Together and separately, Tongson, Balance, and Vazquez's work on suburban diasporic communities and pop culture, both mainstream and marginal, shows that the critical and political value of fannishness extends well beyond the self-identified subcultural geek communities on which the body of intellectual work gathered under the heading of "fan studies" has tended to focus. They talked to us about the critical and political value of queered and racialized fannish affects, intellectual labor and performance in and out of the academy, and the articulation between academic institutions and online public spheres.

[1.3] The following TWC editorial team members contributed to this interview: Alexis Lothian and Julie Levin Russo.

Our first suggestion to our compatriots is not just to show off the illustrious Board's name on the masthead page, but instead all of THEIR names on the working Editorial Team, who we know have put a lot of (cylon) blood, sweat and tears into this whole endeavor. Allow us to shout them out here and congratulate them on a great new journal:

Editors

Kristina Busse, Independent
Karen Hellekson, Independent

Review editors

Deborah Kaplan, Tufts University, United States
Mafalda Stasi, Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris, France
Cynthia W. Walker, St. Peter's College, United States

Symposium editors

Cole J. Banning, New York University, United States
Alexis Lothian, University of Southern California, United States
Julie Levin Russo, Brown University, United States

Copyeditors

Margie Gillis
Shoshanna Green, independent freelancer
Mara Greengrass

Layout editors

Rrain Prior

Proofreader

Liza Q Wirtz, Life, the Universe, and Everything