Latinx Fandoms: Seeking Submissions
Latinx Fandoms
Editor: Frederick Luis Aldama
Despite the recent boom in fan studies scholarship—a field that has traditionally provided space for those deemed academically undisciplined—significant gaps remain in our understanding of the cultural impact of Latinx fan communities and scenes. With Latinx Fandoms I hope to address this by bringing together the work of extraordinary scholars to highlight Latinx practices, knowledges, and cultural innovations as fans, fandoms, and collective shapers of scenes.
Latinx Fandoms will explore how Latinx fan communities and scenes engage with and transform cultural phenomena, from traditional media to digital spaces. I welcome any methodological approach including auto-ethnography, netnography, fan site analysis; all theoretical frameworks are welcome, too, from Latinx, feminist, queer, media, communication, and performance studies.
Your chapter could address broad theoretical questions, like, how do Latinx fandoms function as “forums for sustained critical discourse” (Ben Woo), engage in “scene thinking” and “scene-making” (Woo), and reinterpret and transform mainstream cultural phenomena. You might use these methods and approaches to explore the specific areas Latinx fandom such as:
- Culinary scenes
- Music, performance, and cosplay scenes
- Digital and social media fan scenes
- Digital meet-up scenes like Tumblr, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, and Discord
- Podcast scenes
- Kid, YA lit scenes
- Sci-Fi, horror, and other genre scenes
- Comics, zine scenes
- Film, TV, anime, and animation scenes
- Gaming and e-sports scenes
- LGBTQ+ pop culture scenes
- Fan production scenes: fan-fiction, fan-art, fan-vidding
- Intermedial and transmedial fan scenes
- Library scenes
- Latinx Aca-fan (academics engaging in fandom) and Latinx scholar-fan (fans using scholarly tools to analyze fandoms) scenes
- Pop art and visual culture scenes
Please submit chapter proposals (up to 300 words) by February 1, 2025:
Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2025.
Final essays, ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words (max), are due by August 15, 2025.
About the Editor: Frederick Luis Aldama is an award-winning author of 52 books, including novels, children’s books, comics, graphic novels, and scholarly works. He is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin, where he is also founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Latinx Pop Magazine and FlowerSong Press. He is editor and coeditor of a dozen book series, including Biographix, Latinographix, and Brown Ink. He is author of children’s books, including The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (published in English and Spanish) and the bilingual, Con Papá / With Papá. He is co-creator and producer of the award-winning animation short, Carlitos Chupacabra (Cannes Animation Fest 2023). He is author of comic books and graphic novels, including Pyroclast, Through Fences, Labyrinths Borne, and The Steampunkera Chronicles (forthcoming) as well as the YA novel, The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez. He is an inductee of the National Cartoonist Society, Texas Institute of Letters, and Ohio State University's ODI Hall of Fame, and serves on the board of directors for The Academy of American Poets.