ABSTRACT
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' 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 occasionally to use the footage to tell new stories", has a long history dating back to Kandy Fong's projected slideshows at fan conventions in 1975. In addition to the self-defined media fandom networks, there are gay and lesbian and queer spaces where people are making vids from a perspective where the identification and politics of participants is a bigger part of the network/community's self-understanding than it is in self-identified vidding subculture.
