Here's the abstract I submitted. Comments, as always, are welcome.
The 800-pound gorilla of soft political capital, anime is
not coincidentally an economic powerhouse.
It’s also wildly popular, to boot.
It should be no surprise, then, that the number of fan groups dedicated
to distributing fan translations (“fansubs”) of anime has exploded in recent
years: MyAnimeList, a site that crowd
sources information about fansubbing groups, currently lists close to 1500
groups or partnerships between groups dedicated to this form of participatory
fandom, an exponential leap from a decade ago when the number of groups
numbered in the dozens. The majority of those
listed, however, fall into a category fans call “speedsubs,” groups who rework
the subtitles of another organization and re-release an updated version hours
after the original broadcast.
Many in the anime fansubbing community do not consider
speedsubs to be legitimate exercises in fan engagement as they do not produce
original work. In this sense, the
outrage is tacitly backed by Henry Jenkins’ definition of fandom— “a way of
appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different
interests, a way of transforming mass culture into popular culture”—in that
speedsubs maintain the “mass” part of culture through their focus on
cookie-cutter translations. What often
gets overlooked in theorization, however, are the roles discrete media objects,
the technological ecologies upon which they are built, and the regulatory
environments in which they operate inform this fan production.
This paper offers an intervention into the theorization
of fandom by arguing that speedsubs represent a valid—albeit qualitatively
different—form of appropriation. At
stake in Jenkins’ definition is how we conceptualize what gets appropriated and
reworked: in short, the “content.” Typically approached in terms of narrative
appropriation (fan fiction, doujinshi being
archetypical studies) this standpoint overlooks McLuhan’s theorization that the
content of a medium is another medium; from this vantage, speedsubs constitute an
equally valid form of participatory fandom in that their appropriation and
rereading of texts rests with tweaking media themselves. In developing this argument, I rely on Virilio’s
theorization of hypermodernity and the fetishization with speed that
accompanies it, linking the development of speedsubs to wider technological
advances centered on instantaneity such as the development of distribution
networks (e.g. BitTorrent, MegaUpload) emergent from broadband technologies,
and the democratization of personal video capture and editing tools (e.g.
freeware such as Aegisub). In discussing
the impact of these innovations on speedsubs, I acknowledge that regulatory
schema play an essential role in their maturity.
