Alexis Lothian
· Associate Professor, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality StudiesVerifiedUniversity of Maryland, College Park · The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Active 2006–2025
About
Alexis Lothian is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in queer and feminist media and cultural studies. Her research centers on speculative fiction, digital media, and online fandom, with a focus on their intersections with gender, race, and disability justice. She authored the book 'Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility,' published in 2018 by NYU Press, which explores alternative futures envisioned by feminists, queers, and people of color in Britain and America, analyzing how these narratives challenge dominant historical and political discourses. Lothian also creates video remixes related to her work, including 'This is a Low: Old Futures in the Age of Brexit.' Currently, she is working on two book projects: a co-authored book on slash fan fiction and the politics of fantasy, and a monograph examining the development of critical and social justice-oriented fan cultures in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Her extensive publications address the relationship between feminist and queer knowledge production and media fans' creative practices, emphasizing digital infrastructure, racial justice, and critical fandom. As an associate professor at The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, she contributes to academic discourse on digital humanities, media studies, and social justice through her research, teaching, and editorial work.
Research signals
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Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Gender studies
- Art
- Aesthetics
- Computer Science
- Psychoanalysis
- Philosophy
- Law
- World Wide Web
- Psychology
- Media studies
- Theology
- Art history
- History
Selected publications
2025-03-10
book-chapterIdentity has frequently been at the heart of scholarly discussions of fans’ transformative works. Fanvidding, 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” (Coppa 2008), has a long history, and more than any other form of fan production, it has been shaped by technological shifts and emerging platforms. Despite this shift in the visibility and variety of contemporary fanvids, at their core they remain an important space of media production for marginalized voices and representations. In this conversation, vidding scholars Francesca Coppa, Alexis Lothian, and Tisha Turk discuss the ways in which vidding offers a unique space to consider questions of identity. This conversation has been revised slightly from the version published in the first edition in 2018.
Bourgeois Novel, Realism — Science Fiction, Post-modernism — Visionary Fiction, Cataclysm
2025-03-07
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCaptain America, Genderqueer Socialist: The Utopian Politics of Queer Fan Fiction
Utopian Studies · 2025-06-01
article1st authorCorrespondingABSTRACT As a practice of literalizing narrative desire, fan fiction can be a rich source of utopian imagination. Participants in fandom and academic spaces alike discuss the capacity for fan fiction’s content to live up to the utopian potential of its form and distribution: how might a cultural formation based on the fantasy fulfillment of desire hold space for the complex and contradictory relationships between pleasure and power? To unpack some contradictions and possibilities inherent in fan fiction’s queer utopian work, this article develops a case study of Known Associates (thingswithwings, 2016), a long, complex, and influential work of fan fiction. The story reimagines the Marvel Comics Universe character Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America—who is transported from World War II to the present––as a queer femme socialist sympathetic to Black social movements of the early twentieth century. Known Associates develops an eroticized articulation of American feminist, queer, trans, and left social movement history. To the queerly utopian fantasy that Captain America might have always been a radical, queer, gender-nonconforming figure, Known Associates grafts a longing for the possibility that the national institutions of the U.S., founded on slavery and settler colonialism though they are, might be imagined and lived otherwise.
Bourgeois Novel, Realism — Science Fiction, Post-modernism — Visionary Fiction, Cataclysm
2025-03-10
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCombating the informatics of domination demands other ways to tell stories and imagine worlds. “A Cyborg Manifesto” calls up such possibilities in its invocation of Octavia E. Butler. This essay turns to N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth Trilogy to explore how Black, queer, and decolonial imaginaries render the binary oppositions between realism and science fiction, modernism and postmodernism incomprehensible. “Visionary fiction, cataclysm” is the third term the essay invokes to think through these cultural formations and their capacity to rewrite the bourgeois science fiction realisms of the 2020s and beyond.
2. Bourgeois Novel, Realism — Science Fiction, Post-modernism — Visionary Fiction, Cataclysm
2025-03-09
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAn archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure
Transformative Works and Cultures · 2021 · 117 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of fannish racism, we turn to the specifics of AO3, the political commitments embedded in its systems, and how attention to racial justice could transform them. Drawing on fan fiction genres, we offer three potential models for thinking through these possibilities: a fix-it that would extend AO3's existing metadata structures; a canon divergence that would alter the makeup of the content on AO3; and an alternative universe that draws from abolitionist organizing to imagine the broadest structural changes of all.
New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNew York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingNew York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding14. Sex, utopia, and the queer temporalities of fannish love
New York University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Sociology
- Gender studies
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Kristina Busse
- 3 shared
Moya Bailey
- 3 shared
Nico Carpentier
Charles University
- 3 shared
Amanda Phillips
- 3 shared
Henry Jenkins
- 2 shared
Francesca Coppa
- 2 shared
Tisha Turk
- 2 shared
Natalie Fenton
Education
Ph.D.
University of Southern California
Awards & honors
- Motherboard of the Otherwise Award
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