Can I Be Frank with You?

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.

Our stories, our selves: Star Wars fanfictions as feminist counterpublic discourses in digital imaginaria

Fanfiction has a long and varied history in the Star Wars franchise since it began in 1977 with the debut of the first film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The decade of the 1970s created new possibilities for science fiction multiverses and metanarratives; science fiction became an adaptive film genre that could be reimagined with seemingly infinite narrational results. The myriad of genre films that were released in the mid-to-late 1970s revealed dynamic syntheses with horror (e.g. Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), franchises that previously had existed solely on television (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and musical theatre (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Cinematic audiences became increasingly accustomed to science fiction tropes and themes in film; audience participation in the theatre (e.g. The Rocky Horror Picture Show) expanded to print zines (often with fanfiction) for multiple franchises as well as fan conventions. Fanfiction’s beginnings as an analogue culture dramatically changed with the advent of the internet and the evolution of fandoms as digital cultures. Web-based platforms such as FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3) host sundry fan communities’ creative outputs including podcasts, art and, most frequently, fanfiction stories. The release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 immediately captured the fandom’s imagination; the animosity and tension between the new villain Kylo Ren (Ben Solo) and protagonist Rey of Jakku particularly fascinated the young adult fans who were lately converted to the Star Wars fandom due to this pairing (known as Reylo within the fandom and within cinematic circles). The newest generations of fans were acclimated to audience participation and paratextual interactions due to their positions as digital natives. The Reylo fan phenomenon particularly erupted into fanfictions as critical data artefacts, even predicting Reylo as a romantic pairing years before the second and third films in the franchise trilogy Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The Reylo pairing is just one example of how online Star Wars fanfiction communities expand audience participation to autonomous collective identity formation. This article examines feminist fanfictions in the Star Wars fandom as gendered critical data artefacts, as collaborative communities of practice, and as counterpublic discourses that apply feminist critiques to conventional gender roles within the most recent film trilogy and the fandom itself.

Queer(y)ing Masculinities

This chapter tests the limits of understanding what masculinity means or tries to mean. It insists that queer masculinities are those that are not only suspicious, resistant, or out of the ordinary, but are also those that elude while stabilizing meaning. In other words, at the moment we examine the Rocky Horror Picture Show or an online dating site, we establish a set of assumptions regarding who people are; yet, we develop this interplay of subjectivities that presumptively iterates binaries without ever challenging how heterosexuality is nothing more than a construction of the masculine ideal. The chapter beckons us to not get too comfortable with our learned sense that we know what masculinity is. It turns our assumptions regarding masculinity topsy-turvy and forces us to recognize that whether you are a Rasta, rude boy, martial artist, womanizer, athlete, or soldier, masculinities are defined social constructions that vary across culture, context, and community.

Normal versus Freak

Within the world of performance exists a line ofothering. By juxtaposing the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the historical freak show, the issue of staring becomes more apparent.