1. Introduction
[1.1] When I was thirteen and really getting into superhero movies, I had my first encounter with fandom through video edits of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Eventually, I realized I could use iMovie (which I had learned in order to make family travel videos) to also make my own fan-video edits. The first edit I made was of Black Widow from Iron Man 2 (2010). I spent the rest of my teen years making edits of my favorite characters and relationships; it was this video-editing experience and the love I had for my fan art that eventually led me to apply for film school. Nearly a decade later, film school has taught me that fan vidding—which I had initially thought to be a contemporary fandom practice only popular among teenagers—is not new.
[1.2] I discovered that a rich scholarship on this continuously emerging art of fan vidding already existed. Francesca Coppa, a prominent fan-vidding scholar, has a large body of work dedicated to examining these edits. Not only has she documented their history, which often begins with Kandy Fong's VHS/VCR Star Trek fan vids in the mid-1970s, but she has also investigated the subject in regard to feminine identity, feminist fandom, and feminine labor.
[1.3] Additionally, fan vidding has already been explored alongside queerness, which seems natural considering fan vidding's early intersection with slash (homosexual) fan work. Alexis Lothian, in a conversation with Coppa and Tisha Turk, cites Cecilia Barriga's 1991 Meeting of Two Queens as what could essentially be described as a "14-minute multifandom femslash VCR vid featuring Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo" (quoted in Coppa et al. 2017, 238). Later on, in her 2018 book Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, Lothian cites another example of queer fan-vidding work, Lim's 2007 vid Us, that crafts "a meta-analysis of media fan culture rooted in the history of male/male slash" (228). Throughout the conversation and her book, Lothian (2018) continuously maintains that there exists a relationship between fan vidding and queerness. She explains that video remixing, another term for fan vidding, has always been a "playground" to recuperate and reframe nonnormative desires hidden within mainstream media.
[1.4] Lothian summarizes queer fan vidding neatly, but I am inclined to highlight that queer fan-vidding scholarship itself seems to be primarily focused on its intersection with slash fan work with cisgender male characters in gay relationships. But what of the genderqueer? In her conversation with Lothian and Turk, Coppa recounts Talitha's 2014 Problem, a vid of fictional character Bucky Barnes, also known as the antihero Winter Soldier. Coppa praises the vid's framing of Barnes, a canonically cisgender male character, as the girl in the song's lyrics, writing that "the pleasure of the vid is in the intuitive and internal mapping out of the ways in which that girl, Bucky Barnes, is a goddamned problem" (Coppa et al. 2017, 235). Coppa's analysis here is one defending the feminine: There is nothing wrong with being a girl. But while a feminist lens is certainly critical to approach the fan vid, I would like to expand on Coppa's perspective by acknowledging the significance of Barnes's gender being queered—that a transition has occurred.
[1.5] I hope to build further upon this particular scholarship of fan vidding and queerness by examining a specific type of queer fan vids: the recent fancams on social media that queer a character's gender identity. By suspending, dissecting, and reassembling the linear narratives of their source material, fancams queerly reimagine the canon of fictional characters by deliberately suggesting a cisgender character is transgender through montage, graphics, and music (note 1).
2. #transpeterparkeredit: A case study
[2.1] I view fancams as a similar, but just different enough, form of fan vidding to be acknowledged as something else. While the term fancam can refer to a specific kind of video taken of a celebrity that originated in K-pop fandom, the term is used more colloquially in this paper, reflecting its use in fandom to refer to any montage video edit of a celebrity or fictional character. This form of short video edit is accompanied by music and visual effects like transitions and filters. Despite sharing general characteristics such as montage editing and music accompaniment, unlike fan vids, fancams usually:
- [2.2] are much shorter, at around 15 to 30 seconds long,
- are stylized to be visually distinct from their source material (filters that completely change the color palette or introduce new effects like flickering or film grain),
- have much faster cuts and dynamic transitions (slides, warps, flashes),
- include supplementary motion design (typography, shape transitions),
- and are largely distributed through social media platforms used primarily on mobile devices that prioritize short-form content (Instagram, TikTok, X [formerly known as Twitter]).
[2.3] I do not intend to assertively draw a hard line between fan vids and fancams by claiming they each have unique characteristics that do not overlap. Rather, I want to be intentional by specifically discussing and analyzing fancams that have the aforementioned characteristics, as well as a genderqueer subject, in order to further the conversation on queer fan vidding.
[2.4] The primary fancam I analyze is by TikTok user zpspv767, where the fictional character Peter Parker (also known by the superhero alias Spider-Man) from the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Spider-Man movie series is depicted as a transmasculine character (https://www.tiktok.com/@zpspv767/video/7149676105073462534; @zpspv767, October 1, 2022). The fancam opens with a scene between Parker and his best friend, who asks him if he lays eggs. In the movie itself, this line of questioning is related to his curiosity about Parker's set of superhuman abilities as Spider-Man. However, out of context, the fancam quickly reframes this as a question related to Parker's reproductive organs. So when Parker bashfully says that he does not lay eggs, and a small image of the transgender flag is edited onto his cheek, the fancam frames this interaction as Parker covering up the truth of his reproductive organs. This implication is repeated multiple times throughout the fancam.
[2.5] In another moment of the fancam, Parker's aunt tells him, "I know it's really hard trying to fit in with all the changes your body is going through." The original context of Parker's aunt comforting him as he tries to fit in at school while hiding his superhero identity is recontextualized by the transgender flag edited onto Parker's face throughout the shot-reverse-shot dialogue exchange; consequently, her dialogue is made to seem like she's sympathizing with his transition as a transmasculine person in school. Later on in the fancam, dressed in his Spider-Man costume, Parker is seen desperately asserting, "I'm not a girl, I'm a boy! I mean, I'm a—I'm a man." Originally trying to defend himself against another character who makes fun of his voice modulator, this recontextualized moment of Parker insisting that he is a man with the transgender flag edited onto his superhero mask seems to emulate how a transmasculine person might try to defend themselves and their gender identity.
3. Queer time and space in fancams
[3.1] All of these editing choices have their own strategies and effects to queer Parker, but an overarching method I want to first highlight is the queering of time and space originally found in the source material. In his watershed book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, J. Jack Halberstam develops this concept "in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction" and "according to other logics of location, movement, and identification" (2005, 12–13). Editors Juan Francisco Belmonte Ávila and Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo of Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games advocate for similar queer reimaginings, stating that their volume of work "seeks examples of identities projected through and in time that queer expectations to create freer forms of desiring that problematize linearity" (2024, 3). They explain that "form, and not only content, is a facilitator for the imagining of queer spaces and times, for the representation of identities that resist homogenizing processes, and for the questioning of traditional forms of representation that are aligned with identity-reductive visions…Time can be represented as a discontinuous entanglement that problematizes linear—and reductive—fictional and social narratives" (6).
[3.2] Therefore, we can view fancams as possessing both the form and content to queer time and space. By rejecting the original temporality of their source material that functions through a linear and continuous narrative, fancams construct a queer time and space where scattered, recontextualized clips and nondiegetic music reimagine a queer narrative that does not need to rely on traditional cinematic structure. Essentially, as Lothian also finds, vidding possesses "the potential to craft alternate versions of media temporalities" (2018, 218–19).
[3.3] There are several specific editing choices in zpspv767's fancam that layer on top of one another to produce the transgendering of Peter Parker, a canonically cisgender male character. Turk explains that by breaking down and reconstructing the structure of narratives, vids inherently "alter the original narratives they're based on" as vidders pick and choose what to use and discard (quoted in Coppa et al. 2017, 234). First, the addition of the transgender flag edited onto Parker's face is perhaps the most obvious indication that this character is being reinterpreted as a transmasculine character in the fancam. Paired alongside deliberate scene clips with specific moments of dialogue that are then implied to be about Parker's transgender identity and not the original superhero context it was lifted from, the fancam begins to build his visual and narrative transgender queering.
[3.4] This is further emphasized by the typography that serves as subtitles to the dialogue. Purposefully embedded into the fancam itself, the burned-in subtitles (as opposed to closed captions that can be turned on and off) highlight the dialogue in the scene that is critical to understanding that the fancam is positioning Parker as a transmasculine character. Last, as with any classic fan vid and fancam, the song choice of "Runaway Runaway" by Mars Argo bolsters the fancam's message. Katharina Freund's article on fan vidding and storytelling highlights how "it is this emotional role of music that vidders are able to draw on when creating their vids," and quotes Claudia Gorbman's claim that "music, like the caption, anchors the image in meaning, throws a net around the floating visual signifier, assures the viewer of a safely channeled signified" (2018, 210–11). So when zpspv767 edits the fancam to the lyrics "Am I living an illusion? / I want to runaway, runaway, runaway," this detaches the clips from their original movie, soundtrack, dialogue, and sound design; the fancam thus uses the new weight of Argo's song about feeling unseen and unheard, and consequently wanting to run away, in a transgender recontextualization, where Parker is now made to seem like he's struggling with his transgender identity.
4. Genderqueer time and space in fancams
[4.1] I'd like to return to Lothian's alternative vidding temporality in fancams and apply Halberstam's notion of undesirable queer time and the temporality of the transgender gaze, as well as Ávila and Encarnación-Pinedo's unearthed queer times. Halberstam (2005) uses queer time to contrast with (and thus reveal) the Western desire for longevity and stability that pathologizes modes of living that disregard such desires; the "people who live in rapid bursts (drug addicts, for example)" and their ludic temporalities (alternatively termed "junk time" by writer William Burroughs) end up exposing "the artificiality of our privileged constructions of time and activity" (17–18).
[4.2] The so-called abnormal, undesirable, and unrespectable notions of "rapid bursts," "ludic temporality," and "junk time" could be argued to all be utilized within fancams. The quick and jaunty editing pace—as well as the brevity of the fancam itself, which primarily features discontinuous, second-long shots of Parker—transforms the feature-length narrative into a playground. The visual effects similarly and completely revisualize the polished movie, adding half-tone borders, jittery effects, and a new square crop, and even splitting the screen to show two shots of Parker side by side at times. Fancams ultimately have little regard for the long periods of stability of the source material that demand and privilege the production of a coherent narrative, and are here to have fun, mess things up, and go. This fun comes through in the genderqueering of a canon.
[4.3] In dissecting the cinematic reveal of a character as transgender, Halberstam explains, "The exposure of a trans character whom the audience has already accepted as male or female causes the audience to reorient themselves in relation to the film's past in order to read the film's present and prepare themselves for the film's future" (2005, 128–29). Using the fancam as a method of exposing a character canonically known to be cisgender as transgender means that an audience member has to confront, reckon with, and ultimately move on from their previous understanding of the source material in order to embrace and understand this new queered characterization. Time, in relation to the queered character, is no longer an ever-progressing, ever-resolute momentum from their cis-straight origin. Instead, disinterested in a timeline that makes sense, the fancam queers time in order to explore the potential of its character's gender identity. This goes hand in hand with Ávila and Encarnación-Pinedo "unearthing queer times." They write that interrogating the past turns time into a "queer ally" in which queer individuals can exist in the past, present, and future; by understanding the past and therefore present more completely, queer individuals can "understand themselves as belonging to processes of identity formation and political participation that extend, multidirectionally and polysemantically, beyond themselves and across wide expanses of time" (2024, 9–10).
[4.4] Their idea of the past as a rich ground for discovering queer potential to be utilized in the future parallels the idea of the canon as an equally potent material for uncovering queer potentiality to be ignited in fancams; it is evident that queer time and space provides a framework to upset dominant ideas of how lives and stories are supposed to unfold. Nothing—especially not heteronormative, cisnormative cinema—is sacred enough not to be queered. The queering of time and space ultimately "has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space" (Halberstam 2005, 13).
5. Inter- and extratextuality as queer time and space
[5.1] Finally, we cannot have a discussion about queer time and space in fancams without noting that the source material of zpspv767's fancam is not just of a single movie but rather both Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), where there are a couple of shots of Parker from the sequel. Sourcing clips of a character from multiple works is not an uncommon use of queer time and space in fancams, as is additionally demonstrated by TikTok user sapphicfrancesca's fancam of Crowley from the Good Omens TV show and Loki from the Loki TV show as "genderfluid queers" (https://www.tiktok.com/@sapphicfrancesca/video/7316181775313636641, @sapphicfrancesca, December 24, 2022).
[5.2] zpspv767's use of multiple movies is rather straightforward: Using two movies instead of one gives them access to more clips of Parker to use in their fancam. What's more complex about sapphicfrancesca's use of multiple characters from different TV shows is that paralleling two separate characters with their shared characteristics as "genderfluid queers" compresses intertextual space. Freund explains that this intertextuality "exists both in the minds of the author/vidder and in that of the audience, as they draw on genre knowledge, media literacy, style influences, and previous works as part of their interpretive process" (2018, 209). So, despite the fact that neither Crowley nor Loki explicitly call themselves queer, sapphicfrancesca magnifies their queerness by beginning the fancam with the clips where Crowley mentions he's neither "good" nor "a lad" and Loki mentions he's into "a little bit of both [princesses and princes]" consecutively. Intertextual knowledge consists of not only paralleling the two characters (someone who recognizes one of the characters as queer could conclude that the other must also be queer because they're in the same fancam) but also the broader contextual knowledge of these characters from their other origins (Crowley is a demon in his book origins, and therefore has no conception of human gender, and Loki is a queer genderfluid god of trickery in his comic book origins).
[5.3] This is only further strengthened by the extratextual queer space. zpspv767's hashtags for the fancam include #transpeterparker #transpeterparkeredit #trans #transgender #transmasc #transman #transftm #ftm #lgbt, and sapphicfrancesca's caption calls Crowley and Loki "genderfluid queers." The use of social media elements to queer the fancams' characters, as well as to magnify a canon queerness, highlights the informal, nonindustry space that fancams exist in and are distributed through.
[5.4] Regardless of how zpspv767 and sapphicfrancesca's fancams' use inter- and extratextuality to queer time and space, the resulting effect of further illustrating the genderqueering of their characters is similarly captured by Halberstam: "Queer time…exploits the potential of what Charles-Pierre Baudelaire called in relation to modernism 'The transient, the fleeting, the contingent.'…And yet queer time, even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing" (2005, 14).
[5.5] In this way, the fancams "compress and annihilate" their original source material in order to capture "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent" genderqueer. It does not matter that these are two separate characters from two different television shows if the 14-second-long fancam believes that the only thing that matters is their queerness, and not any sort of linear, contained television show narrative. Here is the potentiality of a queer life unscripted.
6. Conclusion
[6.1] I find myself often returning to Susan Stryker's (1994) essay "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage" when discussing the sheer power of the genderqueer on a heteronormative, cisnormative society. I'd like to conclude with her performance piece she transcribed, where she cries out at its end: "Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process…You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both…Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself" (1994, 247).
[6.2] Stryker lauds the bodily construction of the transgender self and highlights the empowerment of seams and sutures. In this way, I transfer Stryker's empowerment of the genderqueer cut and assembly to Kaja Silverman's theory of cinematic suture in order to ultimately propose that fancams are a particularly rich site of cinematic genderqueer suture that heals after it takes apart (1983, 201–15).
[6.3] This might seem like a particularly bold statement considering that fancams are, on the surface, video edits largely made by queer youths in adoration of their favorite fictional works. However, I argue that the scholarly connections in my work could be bolder precisely because of who they are made by. Coppa et al. note the hostility toward fan vids as a pleasurable practice, stating that feminine time arises from a culture where "women's time isn't supposed to be theirs! Women's time is owned by other people!…Women aren't allowed to do things for themselves" (2017, 235). That is such a shame; there is so much left to learn if we allow ourselves to seriously consider that genderqueering fancams are a liberating, radical queer time and space for the queer community.
[6.4] Lothian's (2018) epilogue discusses the necessity of her scholarship on speculative fiction and queer possibility at her time of writing with Donald Trump's first United States presidency and Brexit-era British conservative politics. In many ways, I find my own foray into the study of fancams as queer time and space to be colored by a similar political urgency as Trump's second presidency—and his transphobic rhetoric and policies—rages on. However, emboldened by the rallying cries of the scholars and creatives I consult in this work, I know that there is a better, queerer life out there—made by me, made for me, one #transpeterparkeredit fancam at a time.
7. Acknowledgments
[7.1] I would like to thank Professor Ronald Gregg for his wonderful Queer Cinema class where I first developed this article for his final paper, and Professor Jack Halberstam for an insightful office-hour visit. I also wish to thank Kelsey Heyel for their help with last-minute edits for this article, and my parents for getting me Final Cut Pro X to enable my fandom-obsessed teenage years.